The local culture in publichigh schools' ELT coursebooks: a comparison between Brazil and Syria

Abstract

Culture in today's English coursebooks is an essential component. It became as important as the linguistic content. Globalization and the revolution of technology made English a lingua franca, and an international language used for communication almost everywhere whenever the two speakers do not share the same language. At the same time, learners came to the center of the class and of the teaching process and made it important to take into consideration the culture that these learners bring with them. Taking the native culture of students into consideration helps both creating a rapport with them which facilitates the teaching process, and equipping these learners with the necessary tools to express themselves in a world where native speakers are not the only linguistic authority anymore. Using a categorization based on a literature review of the development of the term culture, I analyze in this research the presence, and the representations of the native culture in two series of English language teaching that belong to two different cultures, the Brazilian, and the Arabic. It is a qualitative research that uses content analysis strategies and generates its data using tables created according to cultural categories and subcategories. The research analyzes its generated data seeking similarities and differences in the presenting way and in the cultural choices the books make