Revealing Intercultural Communicative Competence in an EFL High School Textbook

摘要

Since the goal of teaching English is now shifted from communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence (ICC), English teachers should rethink of and be selective on using teaching sources which are mainly referred to textbooks. Many studies were then conducted to analyze the cultural contents in EFL textbooks in Asia whether they meet global goals in ELT. Analyzing textbook contents is now significantly needed by English teachers because of the trend movement in ELT. They should correspond the teaching materials to the notion of ICC in the in-use textbooks. In Indonesia, government has already recommended the English textbooks used at schools. One of them is Bahasa Inggris for the tenth graders. With respect to cultural teaching, English teachers are reluctant to employ the textbook in the classroom. Therefore, this present paper tries (1) to reveal to what extent the learning tasks in Bahasa Inggris contain intercultural competence and (2) to identify what components of intercultural competence are embedded in the textbook learning tasks. This study employs the model of ICC proposed by Byram. The findings show that very small extent learning tasks encourage students' intercultural competence. Yet, communicative competence is much promoted.