Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch
The present study was a descriptive research towards contrasting the cultural points of the English high school textbooks and The New Interchange series. Besides, the second aim was to understand the amount of Iranian high school students' interests to the inclusion of the cultural points of The New Interchange series in their English high school textbooks. Therefore a close-ended Persian questionnaire (a Likert-type scale), including 20 American cultural points was developed by the researcher. Before administration of the questionnaire, the researcher piloted it on a group of 22 high school students to test how long it took to be completed, check that the given situations were not ambiguous, check that the instructions were clear, and eliminate those items that did not yield usable data. As the main study the investigator administered the questionnaires to a number of 218 male and female students at different levels of high school, studying The New Interchange series at English language teaching Institutes. Considering the vast area of culture, the researcher took just similar and totally different cultural points between American and Iranian cultures into consideration. Based on the results obtained from the questionnaires, 87 male students (39.9%) and 127 female students (58.3%) answered to the questions, and the four other students did not specify their sex. On the whole, 65.1% of students that is 70.1% of female and 58.6% of male students agreed with the inclusion of these 20 cultural points in their English textbooks. Moreover, as far as the similar cultural points were concerned, 60% of students, that is 57.5% of male and 62.2% of female students agreed with the inclusion of similar cultural points in their English textbooks. Further, as far as the different cultural points were concerned, 46.8% of students, that is 50% of male and 44% of female students agreed with the inclusion of different cultural points in their English textbooks. Therefore, according to abovementioned results, the null hypotheses of this study were all rejected.
