An Analysis of Cultural Values in EL Textbooks

In the light of growing relations between different cultures and languages as well as the significant role of communication media in today’s world, the understanding of other cultures is felt more than ever before. This need becomes outstanding at the time of learning foreign languages. Learning a foreign language is often accompanied with the importation of specific cultural issues of that language to the domain of the learner. Three decades after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the officials in charge of teaching English language still face the challenge of encountering the differences between the imported culture depicted in the textbooks of foreign languages and those inherent in Islamic-Iranian culture. The present article is an attempt to study the cultural values depicted in Conversation English books taught in some language institutes. One set of books (Impact, Conversation series) was selected and attempts have been made to study the cultural values portrayed in these books through qualitative content analysis. Hence, these values were extracted, classified and statistically analyzed. The results of the study indicate that the books contained many cultural values, the most predominant of which are gender segregation, girl-boy relations, fashion, and apparent beauty. The results also demonstrate that in addition to language knowledge, these English books transfer cultural values of the English native speakers to the learners. Consequently, the imported English books are one of the means of imposing cultural values on language learners.