A Comparison Of How Interculturality Is Presented In Both At The Crossroads And Getting Through Textbooks.

Résumé: The present research aims at investigating the teaching of Intercuturality in the Algerian secondary school English textbooks At the Crossroads and Getting Through. Three objectives have motivated our research. The first objective is to examine whether Byram’s (1997) dimensions of ICC are incorporated in At the Crossroads and Getting Through textbooks. The second objective is to inquire both about EFL teachers’ and textbooks’ authors’ views about the intercultural content in the two textbooks. The third objective is to check whether one textbook favors intercultural learning more than the other and why. In order to meet the objectives of the study, Byram’s framework of Intercultural Communicative Competence (1997) is adopted. In fact, the importance of ICC as a crucial factor for successful cross-cultural communication and interaction has motivated us to go further and find out its implementation in the English textbooks at the secondary school. The data are gathered from the textbook evaluation of the schoolbooks under investigation, from a questionnaire distributed to teachers and from an interview conducted with three authors of the textbooks in order to get more reliable data. As far as data analysis is concerned, a mixed method research combining both qualitative and quantitative methods is adopted. The qualitative data are analyzed using Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) while the SPSS is used to analyze the quantitative ones. Our research findings reveal that the four dimensions of Byram’s model of ICC are included in the two textbooks and are presented through different forms: texts, tasks, pictures, project works etc. However, regarding the lack of intercultural content in the textbooks, learners are not given opportunities to develop the intercultural competencies. Accordingly, EFL teachers’ answers to the questionnaire supported this point. Indeed, their answers show their dissatisfaction with the limited amount of information, topics and tasks that deal with the intercultural dimension. Thus, they wish to enrich and vary the content in order to develop the learners’ intercultural abilities. Conversely, the results of the interview with the textbooks’ authors indicate that the two textbooks are equipped with the necessary materials, but it is the teachers’ responsibility to find the right methods through which they can transmit the needed intercultural knowledge. Finally, from the comparison between the two textbooks in terms of incorporating intercultural content, it has been concluded that At the Crossroads for (SE1) favors more intercultural learning than Getting Through for (SE2) because in this latter the big share is given for linguistic objectives.

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