The Presentation of Indonesian Cultural Content in the ELT Textbook Entitled "Pathway to English" for Senior High School Students

Abstract

This study analysed the presentation of Indonesian cultural content in the ELT textbook entitled “Pathway to English” that is used for senior high school in Indonesia which is published by Erlangga publisher and written by Theresia M. Sudarwati and Eudia Grace. This present study analysed the visual material and written material, including the reading materials, dialogues, quotes and exercises by using Yuen’s cultural dimension which is expected to give a deep understanding of the presentation of Indonesian cultural content in this textbook. To examine the Indonesian cultural content endorsed in this textbook, the written and visual materials were analysed based on four aspects introduced by Yuen (2011); products, practices, persons, and perspectives. The cultural dimension of products is measured about cultural things and products like food, places (travel places and historical sites), merchandise and literature works. Next, practices refer to the cultural activities including the custom, daily life and society. Then, person aspects can be categorized as famous individuals or fictitious and unknown people who present a certain culture. It can be in the forms of heroes, national figures, artists, singers and writers. Meanwhile the perspective aspect is the cultural material that expressed the particular belief, values and perceptions that could guide a community’s behaviour in social practice and daily life. The findings showed that four aspects of Yuen’s cultural dimension (products, practices, perspective and persons,) which presented the Indonesian cultural content were appeared in this textbook through visual and written materials. The result of the analysis showed that the cultural dimension of products is the most mentioned with fourteen times in total. Meanwhile, the perspectives aspect is the least appeared with four times depiction from the whole chapter in this textbook. Moreover, The Indonesian cultural content in this textbook were endorsed through reading, writing, speaking and listening skill and also grammar and vocabulary competence as well. They were mostly found in written material in the form of reading material sections. Meanwhile, the Indonesian cultural contents in this textbook were still unequally presented in this textbook. It showed that a cultural values of perspectives aspect was less presented with only four times depiction in this textbook. Therefore, the author and the teachers should be concerned about this imbalance since learning culture in the classroom is really important for students’ development in intercultural communicative competence skill. Moreover, teachers in the classroom can provide additional material, it could be in the form of reading materials, dialogues, role plays, instructions and other classroom activities that contain Indonesian cultural contents beside this textbook to overcome this phenomenon. Furthermore, the result of this research also suggests to the future researchers to conduct a similar research to find the gap by using other cultural dimensions to investigate the cultural material in students’ textbooks.