The View of Culture in Two Textbooks for English

Sammanfattning: The syllabuses for English describe culture vaguely and give room for a discussion about what culture is. Consequently, it becomes important to study the cultural view of textbooks because textbooks are one of the main teaching aids in Swedish schools. The purpose of this degree project is to analyse two English textbooks used at upper-secondary level in Sweden and their implied view of culture. In addition to this I want to find out how Tornberg’s three perspectives on culture are represented in the analysed textbooks. The method used is textual analysis in the form of ideational structure analysis focusing on the contents of text and exercises in the textbooks. My results show that Blueprint A, one of the analysed textbooks, is characterized by the cultural perspective that Tornberg refers to a meeting in the third place. In the other analysed book, Core 1, a majority of the texts may be connected to the same perspective but there is also a significant amount of texts connected to the other two perspectives identified by Tornberg, an accomplished fact and a future competence.