Evaluating Intercultural Awareness Raising in Two Estonian EFL Secondary School Textbooks

Abstract

Nowadays teachers have rarely an opportunity to work within a monocultural context, and rather than teach English, they have to sensitize students to the cultural component of a multitude of Englishes as well as students’ own cultures. Much of this information is derived from coursebooks. The article tries to fill the gap in the literature in the field of coursebook evaluation in Estonia by analysing intercultural awareness raising in the two local and global EFL coursebooks currently employed in Estonian upper secondary schools. We use a qualitative study with methods of textual analysis to examine how authors introduce interculturality in textbooks. Our findings show that what the coursebooks claim to be providing may not necessarily be what is delivered.