English coursebook

English coursebooks used in vocational secondary schools should accommodate the engineering students’ needs for their future profession. It is essential to reveal company trainers’ and engineers’ perception of the English coursebook used at school to know whether the English coursebook meets students’ needs for their future profession or not. Therefore, in this study, we investigated company trainers’ and engineers’ perception of the English coursebook that is used at vocational secondary schools based on the social semiotic perspective. We distributed open-ended questionnaires and conducted in-depth interviews to both engineers and engineering company trainers as professionals about the topics and registers provided in the English coursebook. The results of data analysis revealed that the topics and registers in the coursebook are not relevant with what students need for their future profession as engineers. In fact, both engineers and company trainers believed that the English coursebook should provide topics and registers related to the engineering field. Thus, we hope that the findings of this article would positively contribute to the development of English materials and coursebooks for vocational secondary school level.

The growing interest in learning English language as an international language through international textbooks has necessitated the need for the evaluation of the cultural content embedded in English coursebooks. With regard to the close interrelation of language and culture, this study investigated the extent to which cultural aspects are represented in two international EFL textbooks. To this end, content analysis was used to analyze two commercial coursebooks (i.e., Summit 1a and Viewpoint 1), which are used in Iranian language institutes. The results of the directed content analysis revealed that two subcategories emerged from the content analysis (i.e., technology and environment), which were coded as an off-list category. Therefore, it was found that the reevaluation and extension of Stern’s (1993) framework for culture is necessary. Moreover, the results of the quantitative content analysis showed that there was not a balanced representation of cultural aspects in the selected coursebooks and the most frequent element was individual values in life. In addition, it was found that there was significant variation between the two coursebooks in the representation of culture. The study concluded that more in-depth investigation of cultural content is needed to develop cultural awareness of language learners. This study has implications for language material developers, language teachers, and language learners.