An intercultural analysis of the Algerian middle school course book : "my book of English-year one"

Abstract EN

The cultural component has become as important as the other language components in foreign language instruction.

Teaching materials in general and coursebooks in particular are required to assist learners to develop intercultural communicative competence in today‟s globalisation era.

This work is an attempt to analyse „My Book of English-Year One‟, one of the “second generation” coursebooks introduced recently at the Algerian middle school level, to see to what extent it incorporates the necessary ingredients for intercultural teaching/learning to take place.

The analysis revealed that „knowing oneself‟ is predominant in the book and pupils are not encouraged to consider cultural information in a comparative frame of reference, facts which do not promote the development of intercultural understanding.