Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the cultural content of Saudi secondary school EFL textbooks. The design of this study is a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. One hundred sixty-nine EFL students and their teachers in Saudi secondary schools returned completed questionnaires, 29 of them participated in the interviews, and only two teachers were observed. The process of EFL textbook evaluation was applied to six students’ EFL Saudi secondary school textbooks. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods were used to analyse the results. With regards to the quantitative phase, means were used to analyse the participants’ answers on a 5-point Likert scale and the Mann-Whitney U-test to test the differences between the students’ and their teachers’ answers. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data, and EFL textbooks were evaluated with the use of a checklist and a close-analysis procedure. The results showed that participants considered cultural items from all the suggested categories of cultural items to be of import. However, they either considered the implementation of cultural items from specific suggested cultures to be neutral or of less import. The participants have shown high agreement on all the suggested ways of implementing the cultural items. There were some significant differences between the students’ and their teachers’ answers. Aside from this, participants confirmed in their interviews that the difficulties relevant to activating the cultural items in EFL textbooks could be less effective in the current context of teaching English in secondary schools of Saudi Arabia. The process of textbook evaluation showed that Saudi EFL textbooks lack the methods for improving the students’ intercultural communication skills.

Keywords:

Cultural content, EFL textbooks, Saudi EFL students.