Intercultural Communicative Competence in High School English Textbooks of Iran and India: A Comparative Analysis

It seems that the current English textbook developers are not only interested in developing their audience's communicative competence but also willing to improve the learners' intercultural competence. This shift in instructional goals is in line with the emerging shift in the learners' need to use English as an international language rather than a second or a foreign language. It is noteworthy that there has been considerable research on the cultural content of high school textbooks in Iran; however, little attempt was done to adopt a comparative intercultural perspective to them. Having noticed the weighty contributions of the locally developed textbooks in Iran and India with regard to their expansive distribution and use among English learners, the researcher investigated Iranian high school textbooks (Prospect and Vision) and the official high school textbooks in India (Standard English) from a comparative perspective based on intercultural communicative competence emphasizing critical awareness, and discovery and interaction skills as its defining criteria. Through content analysis, the whole contents of the Iranian and Indian high school English textbooks, 12 volumes in all, were analyzed and the instances the intercultural communicative competence were quantatively recorded, classified and discussed. The results revealed that, Standard English, the textbook developed in outer circle in India, to little extent, included intercultural communicative competence, especially, critical cultural awareness. By contrast, the Iranian high school English textbooks totally were deprived of intercultural communicative competence components since there was not a plausible example of interculturally communicative tasks in Prospect and Vision.