Portrayal of Culture in the EFL School Textbooks in Grade Four in the Public Schools in Egypt

This paper examines the developmental stages of culture in the English as a Foreign Language school textbooks used in grade four in the public schools in Egypt. There are three major stages marking the change in the perceptions of why and how culture needs to be taught in EFL (Weninger & Kiss, 2013). In the first stage, from the mid-1950s to the early 1990s, culture was viewed as an object of study, and EFL learners were expected to learn factual information about the target cultures. The second stage, during the 1990s, introduced a broader view of culture and this included acquainting EFL learners with the habits and the practices of the English native speakers. The third stage, introduced by Byram in 1997, focused on the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), which is the ability to communicate with people from different cultures. The classification of the developmental stages of the concept of culture in EFL was employed to design a three-stage model of analysis (Weninger & Kiss, 2013). The analysis revealed that Egyptian culture is positively represented through various activities on: nature, food items, people demographics, authors, holidays, national festivals, detailed geographic and economic information about some Egyptian governorates, plants and animals. Furthermore, the study found that the Anglo-American cultures are neither idealized nor foregrounded. Rather, the activities on cultural activities were found to enable learners to relate their home culture to different foreign cultures, which is indispensable to enhance their development of intercultural communicative competence.