An Investigation on the Cultural Elements in a Turkish Textbook for Foreigners

Intercultural competence at language classes appears a new trend implying other world cultures into teaching materials. Although researchers have discussed the significance to include cultural elements into L2 curriculum for decades, still there seems inadequacy to overcome this matter. To scholars, language and culture are inseparably acquired together (Brown, 2000; Hedge, 2004; and Jiang, 2000). Therefore, in this study a textbook teaching Turkish for foreigners (TFL) was analyzed attempting to answer the research questions that whether the textbook includes cultural elements (native-C1; target-C2; and other world cultures-C3) related to Turkish culture and/or world cultures. Data were collected through a textbook evaluation checklist. Descriptive statistics and the item frequency procedure were applied in order to analyze C1, C2, and C3 cultural content of the textbook. The results revealed that the cultural elements (C1 and C3) are slightly inserted.