The Representation of Minorities and Immigrants in Turkish High School EFL Coursebooks

AbstractEFL coursebooks are not culturally neutral materials; alongside linguistic content, they also present particular representations of society and may contribute to learners’ understandings of cultural diversity. This representational role is especially relevant in Türkiye, where contemporary classrooms include students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and immigrant backgrounds. Against this background, the present study examines the representation of minority and immigrant communities in a state-published 10th-grade EFL coursebook. Designed as a qualitative document analysis study, the research employs qualitative content analysis to examine the personal names, written texts, and visual materials included in the coursebook. The findings show that minority and immigrant communities receive limited representation in the coursebook examined. Furthermore, the cultural and ethnic backgrounds associated with many personal names are not made explicit, making it difficult to determine whether these names contribute meaningfully to multicultural representation. Although the findings are limited to a single coursebook and cannot be generalized to all state-published EFL materials, they highlight the need for further examination of how cultural diversity is addressed in such materials. The study suggests that future revisions of the coursebook could provide more explicit, balanced, and meaningful representations of minority and immigrant communities, thereby more closely reflecting the diversity of contemporary EFL classrooms in Türkiye.