A Semiotic Approach to Examining the Cultural Content of Locally-Produced English Language Teaching Textbooks

This leading study aimed to identify the type of culturethat a new locally-produced EFL textbookseries represented, and assess its potential to foster students’ cultural communicative competence.To this end, the present approaches to the analysis of cultural content of English language textbooks were problematized, and in addition to using a quantitative classification, a semiotic framework was specifically adopted. This qualitative frameworkis mainly based on the basic notions of the semiotic theory, and examines images, texts and exercises which prompt certain meanings in the act of semiosis. For the purpose of this study, excerpts taken from the locally-produced EFLseries taught in the Iranian high schools were analyzed. Findings indicated that these books were primarily representative of the source culture and secondarily the international culture while ignoring the target culture.The semiotic relationship between images and texts was highly indexical, the images fostered denotational rather than connotational meaning and most of themhad no potential to foster cultural communicative competence. It was suggested that more appropriate images and texts should be incorporated so that students can develop a more reflexive understanding of culture and cultural communicative competence.