Cultural Pigeonholes in English Language Teaching Materials

This paper problematises the cultural content presented in many English coursebooks. It examines the issue of cultural bias in both written texts and visual images, explains how such distortion of culture has entered textbooks, highlights the consequences of such bias, and finally suggests ways to deal with the cultural bias in order to help language learners develop intercultural understanding and competence. For illustrative purposes, the paper presents specific cases of stereotypical information selected from English language coursebooks. These cases fall into four distinctive categories, namely stereotyping appearance, stereotyping gender, stereotyping behavior, and stereotyping lifestyles.