ANALIZA UDŽBENIKA ENGLISH FILE (INTERMEDIATE): INTERKULTURNI KRITERIJUM

Abstract

Contemporary social trends often require international communication among different social groups, so teaching intercultural competence should start from the earliest age of life. The textbook, as the primary teaching tool for teaching a foreign language, should be structured in such a way that, in addition to language competence, the population being taught also develops intercultural ability. In our paper, by applying Brown’s (2000) sociolinguistic criterion and Sobkowiak’s (2015) ten exercise types, we evaluate one such illustrative exponent – the textbook English File: Intermediate Student’s Book (2013) – which is used in Serbian schools to achieve the B2 level of language performance. By applying the quantitative method, we endeavor to determine the share of different cultural elements and whether the way they are presented in a given textbook can lead to the development of intercultural competence. The research results showed that Anglophone culture prevails, representing almost half of the selected corpus, while the other subcategories have a smaller share. International culture makes up approximately a third of illustrative exponents (28%), with preferences being in favor of Romance languages – Italian (23%) and Spanish (19%). As a result of the obtained statistics, it can be argued that the selected textbook shows predispositions for the development of intercultural competence between speakers from Serbian and Anglo-American regions. Furthermore, we examined whether abundant cultural content necessarily contributes to the development of intercultural competence. As a methodological tool, we used Sobkowiak’s list of ten exercise types that contribute to the development of interculturally competent speakers, inferring that the excerpted cultural elements are superficially presented. Therefore, we can conclude that the selected material does not contribute to the development of intercultural competence