Abstract:

Cultural information about the target nations has traditionally been making its way into instructional materials for foreign language teaching, which in the most basic terms can be accounted for by the inherent interrelation between language and culture. Culture-related issues might be incorporated into the classroom discourse as separate learning objects, or can feature as part of the learning content that is not primarily intended to expand learners’ cultural knowledge. In the latter case, cultural information acquires secondary status and serves the purpose of creating the background against which other learning objects are given prominence. It can be argued that regardless of the degree of explicitness and purposefulness of the form in which cultural information is communicated to the learner through instructional materials, the outcome of the whole process is the creation of a certain image of the given nation. The monitoring of such an image, including the evaluation of the specifics of its presentation and its partial components is, therefore, of particular relevance within the framework of the development of learners’ intercultural awareness, both during the regular foreign language instruction and in specialised intercultural training. Thus, the aim of the present research effort is to reconstruct cumulative images of the English-speaking countries, created throughout the sets of the chosen course books of English as a foreign language that are designed for international use. Particular attention in the analysis is devoted to the evaluation of possible impacts of the detected images on learners’ intercultural awareness, including the possible link between images of nations and national stereotypes.

Keywords:

Image construct, English-speaking countries, intercultural awareness, EFL.