INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE FOR HIGH SCHOOL EFL LEARNERS: A CASE STUDY OF ENGLISH 10 FRIENDS GLOBAL TEXTBOOK

Abstract

Living in a globalized world nowadays requires individuals to possess the ability to communicate across cultures. Therefore, acquiring intercultural communicative competence is more important in this day and age than ever before. In ELT (English language teaching) contexts, developing learners’ competence in intercultural communication has been gaining much attention from educators, teachers and researchers. Such stakeholders believe that textbooks are tools that equip learners with diverse cultural backgrounds. Given the critical role of fostering learners’ intercultural communicative competence through the use of textbooks, this study aims to investigate the representation of cultural elements in English 10 Friends Global Textbook. The study used descriptive analysis approach, together with the use of two frameworks proposed by Cortazzi and Jin (1999) and Yuen (2011) in its data collection and analysis. The findings showed that foreign cultural elements presented in the textbook outnumbered local ones, which indicated that English 10 Friends Global Textbook had the potential to develop students’ intercultural communicative competence. Some pedagogical implications are also discussed in this study.