چكيده
The present study aimed to investigate and compare the cultural components used in Iran High schools (i.e. Vision series) and language Institutes (in this case, Four Corners series).Two types of analytical frameworks were used to reach the objectives of this study: ACTFL checklist and Cortazzi and Jin’s (1999) classification for cultural content as well as Aliakbari’s (2005) classification. ACTFL checklist was applied to check the comparability of the books. Reading comprehension passages which had similarities based on the ACTFL standard were chosen and examined with respect to cultural representations both visual (pictures, maps, photographs, illustrations, etc.) and written (names of characters and places, theme of the written texts, etc.). A list of different cultural references in each textbook was compiled. Then, Mean and Standard Deviation were applied to these references. To be sure about the reliability of this comparison, the researcher used expert judgment. The results showed the comparability of Vision1 with Four Corners2, Vision2 with Four Corners3 and Vision3 with Four Corners4. The other framework was Cortazzi and Jin’s (1999) classification for cultural content which consists of three parts: the source (in our case Persian), the target (British/American) and the international target culture (French, German, Spanish, etc.), as well as Aliakbari’s (2005) classification called free-source culture, i.e., those visuals and written texts that have no direct reference to any culture or some referring to general categories such as students, teachers, doctors, etc. After coding the cultural references in each text based on Cortazzi and Jin(1999) and Aliakbari’s (2005) classification, the researcher used the Percentage and Frequency for each cultural references in each book and to see the significance of the difference between the number of these cultural references in two series, the chi-square test was applied. The results indicated that in Four Corners series more attention has been paid to the issue of teaching foreign culture besides teaching language components such as the grammar and vocabulary. On the other hand, in Vision series, the most emphasis has been paid to the source culture, followed by the other three categories of the target, international and free-source culture. Therefore, it is concluded that in Iran, the notion of foreign language culture and teaching of that has been neglected.The findings of this study are helpful for the Ministry of Education of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially for the Curriculum Development and Planning Department, for EFL teachers and for the students themselves.
