Acquiring intercultural communicative competence from coursebooks: An analysis of reading activities in the coursebook “Speakout”

Intercultural communicative competence is recently considered to be a significiant paradigm in language teaching area with the increasing role of English as a global lingua franca, therefore the integration of language and culture has become progressively more important. Since the textbooks are regarded as core teaching materials in foreign language teaching, it is essential for textbooks to contain various intercultural elements in order to construct the way for the development of intercultural communicative competence of learners. In this respect, intercultural content in English textbooks is a necessary issue to be investigated. This present study is an attempt to explore whether intercultural elements persist in language textbooks of Adana Science and Technology University School of Foreign Languages. As a result of the evaluation, it was found that textbook series of Speakout is not sufficient to enhance learners’ intercultural communicative competence through its content in terms of reading activities.