Investigation of Cultural Elements in Coursebooks Developed for Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Article History: Received 20.02.2014 Received in revised form 02.06.2014 Accepted 22.06.2014 Available online 10.08.2014 Learning a foreign language involves more than mastering the language in question linguistically. Since culture and language are inseparable in their essence, any coursebook developed for foreign language teaching should take into consideration the cultural aspects of the language to be taught. The current study aims to investigate two language coursebooks used for teaching Turkish as a foreign language in terms of cultural elements. Descriptive content analysis method was used to determine the cultural elements used in these books and inferences were drawn based on this analysis. The analysis demonstrated that both target and international cultural elements were used all throughout the coursebooks, the former with an overwhelming majority. However, it was concluded that despite the high frequency of cultural elements, they were not presented in depth. Moreover, the coursebooks neglected to present cultural elements with a comparative approach that may have a contributing effect on raising the cultural awareness of the students. The results were discussed and some suggestions were made to overcome the drawbacks in these coursebooks. © 2014 IOJES. All rights reserved