Towards an Understanding of the Appropriate Cultural Content of EFL Textbooks for a Specific Teaching Context: The Case of EFL Textbooks for Saudi Secondary State Schools

The purpose of this study is to understand the appropriate cultural content of EFL textbooks for Saudi state secondary schools according to the students’ and their teachers’ opinions. The design of this study is a sequential explanatory mixed-method design, and each stage is informed by the results of the previous one. Forty-five teachers and 151 students in Saudi secondary schools returned completed questionnaires. Of them, 11 teachers and 18 students participated in follow-up interviews and only two teachers were observed. Aside from this, the process of EFL textbook evaluation was applied to six EFL Saudi secondary school textbooks for students. Means were used to analyse the participants’ answers on a 5-point Likert scale, and inferential statistics were used to test the differences between the students’ and teachers’ answers. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data. The results showed that the participants were interested in including cultural items from all the suggested categories of culture and from a mixture of cultures as long as these cultural items were related to their learning goals and are committed to Islamic standards. However, it seems that many difficulties have reduced the effectiveness of the suggested ways for teaching the cultural content of Saudi EFL textbooks relevant to the students, teachers, and administration practices. The process of the textbook evaluation showed a prevalent result, that the participants’ preferences rarely coincided with their inclusion in their EFL textbooks. Furthermore, the ways for improving intercultural communication skills are purposefully neglected by or go unnoticed by the teachers.