Acquiring Intercultural Communicative Competence through English Language Learning Textbooks: An Analysis of the Learning Tasks in Textbook series American English File Used in Iranian Language Schools

As a result of globalization, everyday people face a variety of cultures. In order for people to become interculturally competent, one wayis to make people familiar with some cultural themes from target cultures. Language classes have long been assumed to provide an appropriate ground to people to learn about other cultures. As one of the main education tools, textbooks are deemed to address such a task. There are some models that have been proposed to help analyze textbooks from this point of view. Byram’s model (1997) is one of the models introduced to address this aim.The model takes factors like attitudes, knowledge and skills into account to analyze textbooks. Drawing on this model, the present study aims to analyze American English File series, as one of the textbooks employed in Iranian English language schools, to show whether the series help students develop an intercultural communicative competence or not. The study was carried out in ZabanSara English language school in Maragheh, East Azerbaijan, Iran. The number of participants was 83. In order to carry out the study, two instruments were employed. A questionnaire was adopted from Ahmadi Safa et al. (2015) and a content analysis was carried out through Yuen’s (2011) content analysis framework. Then the obtained data was fed into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software and the required analyses were run to answer the research questions. The findings proved that American English File series has the potentiality to help students garner some competence to communicate interculturally.