Comparison of American and International Cultural Elements in Touchstone Series

Teaching English as a second/foreign language has been widely explored and developed during the last century. An inevitable aspect of any teaching program or textbook is culture. Learner learning a language not only need to learn the grammar and vocabulary of the language, but they also need to be familiarize with cultural aspects. Although the need to include instances of target and international culture has been accepted globally, the proportion of different aspects of culture is the subject of much discussion in the current literature. The present study is an attempt to analyze one of the common textbooks taught to EFL learners in Iran in terms of four senses of culture proposed by Adaskou et al. (1990). To achieve this goal 20 out of 48 units (five units of each book) were chosen from four Touchstone books. The texts of all materials in the abovementioned sections of the selected unites were printed and analyzed by two people independently. It concludes that the Sociolinguistic sense of culture is the dominant sense of the American cultural occurrences in Touchstone series. It also concludes that none of these four senses are dominant in international cultural occurrences in Touchstone series

Keywords:

international culture , American culture , textbook , EFL