Intercultural Learning in Textbooks. A Comparative Study of English Textbooks at Upper-Secondary School Level in Germany, Iran, the Netherlands, and Sweden

Given the interest in recent years in developing Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) as a key aim in teaching a foreign language, textbooks are often studied and evaluated in terms of their roles and impacts on the promotion of intercultural awareness among language learners. While some textbook designers prefer to focus on the target language culture, others mainly consider the local culture. However, as most of the research has been conducted on a textbook or a series of coursebooks in a single country, there are few studies which analyze the textbooks comparatively in an international setting concerning cultural matters. Thus, the present work attempts to enrich this discussion by analyzing four English textbooks at the first grade of upper-secondary school level from intercultural perspectives in Germany, Iran, the Netherlands and Sweden. In this case, this study aims to investigate the extent to which the texts and activities in the textbooks develop intercultural competence.