Intercultural Competence in Lower Secondary School English Textbooks of Türkiye and Iraq

The growing requirement for present-day English language learners to use English as a lingua franca in the twenty-first century of globalization has necessitated the development of not only communicative competence but also intercultural communicative competence (ICC). English language textbooks, which are considered indispensable didactic tools in English language teaching and learning, can fulfil this requirement. However, to see whether an English language course book develops its audiences’ intercultural communicative competence needs validating or justifying through research. Therefore, the current study examined the extent to which English language textbooks at lower secondary schools contain learning tasks aimed at developing intercultural competence (IC), which is a key component of Byram’s (1997) ICC model. This was done by comparing two different contexts, Türkiye and Iraq, and using Äijälä’s (2009) checklist that is based on Byram’s (1997) model of ICC. The study also looked at the dimensions of intercultural competence and the objectives of those dimensions. The findings showed that the lower secondary school English language textbooks used in Türkiye and Iraq contain IC learning tasks to a limited extent, with the majority of them addressing the “knowledge of cultures” dimension and some but not all objectives.