The rise of English as an international language (EIL) has challenged the focus on native-speaker culture in second language teaching and learning. Exposing learners to a single culture is no longer considered sufficient as intercultural language teaching and understanding gains momentum. The aim of this study was to investigate the representation of culture in dialogues and reading passages in international and localised textbooks used in Iran where localisation is favoured by language education policymakers in their macro-planning. The categorisations proposed by Cortazzi and Jin and Adaskou, Britten and Fahsi were used to conduct a content analysis to see which ‘cultures’ – those associated with the first language, those associated with the target language (TL), or other cultures – and which aspects of each culture (sociological or aesthetic) were addressed in these textbooks. The analysis revealed that most of the cultural elements embodied in the localised textbooks were culturally neutral in that they did not clearly refer to any particular culture and only a few were based on the TL and other cultures. Furthermore, in the localised textbook corpus, first language/local culture did not feature at all, while sociological values were highlighted more than the aesthetic aspects of culture. In contrast, the main focus in the international textbooks was on intercultural elements, two-thirds of which were in the aesthetic category. TL cultural elements were comparatively more evident in the international textbooks while very few representations were culturally neutral.
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