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چکیده
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Being an integral part of language learning and teaching, textbooks need to be evaluated from various dimensions for ensuring their pedagogical contribution to teaching and learning process. One of those dimensions is intercultural competence defined as an ability to change one’s attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors in order to be flexible and open to other cultures (Alred & Byram, 2002). Adopting a mixed-method design, the current study seeks to investigate the high school teachers’ perspectives on the intercultural competence potentiality of an EFL textbook, namely, Prospect One recently introduced to Iranian high school context by Ministry of Education. To do so, about 100 high school teachers in the province of Hamadan are being surveyed using a researcher-made questionnaire based on a model of intercultural competence proposed by Byram (1997). The 5-point Likert-scale questionnaire assesses five factors of Attitudes, Knowledge, Skills of interpretation and relation, Skills of discovery and interaction, and Critical cultural awareness/political education. For the purpose of ensuring the content validity of the instrument, it was expert-viewed and pilot-studied. Running Cronbach alpha consistency, the reliability of the questionnaire was estimated. In order to triangulate the data, about 30 EFL teachers are being interviewed. Having collected the required data, descriptive statistics are to be employed to find out whether Iranian EFL teachers are satisfied with textbook regarding its intercultural competence potentiality. The findings of the present study might be helpful for policy makers, curriculum designers, and material developers to consider the quality of cultural issues in nationally-made ELT materials.
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