Multiculturalism in Discourse of Oxford English Language Teaching Materials: A Reading Course Case

Motivated by discourse analyses favoring the “approaches to studying language’s relation to the contextual background features” (Cutting, 2003: 1), this paper aimed to investigate multiculturalism in the English language teaching materials of Oxford University Press, the case of the 14-chapter intermediate level of Select Readings (Lee Gundersen, 2011). In other words, this research intended to provide a numerical examination of six measures of multiculturalism to see the extent to which a reading comprehension course book of Oxford university Press values and engages other cultures except American. This type of discourse analysis was made possible through adopting the taxonomy suggested by Bhattacharya (2005) for multiculturalism elements and sub-elements. The quantitative/qualitative analysis of this English teaching material revealed that all of the chapters of the corpus satisfy at least one or two criteria of having multicultural topics. Based on the identity of the writers, none of the chapters take care of multiculturalism because all of the passage writers are American. Less than half of the chapters educate learners about other cultures except American, the amount of loan or foreign words is too low and approximately most of the tasks are not intended to provoke ideas and discussions on cultural issues. The present study, however, makes several noteworthy contributions to English language teaching material designers and suggest them to evaluate the audience and their dispersion in various parts of the world, take care of the measures of multiculturalism and involve topics and exercises that encourage cultural discussions to extend tolerance capacity as one of the necessities of today’s global village.