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The purpose of the present study was to evaluate English language textbooks of grade 7, 8 and 9 in theIranian Pedagogical curriculum to see to what extent students are exposed to national, international and target cultural familiar content in their classes. As Gurkan (2012) and Ganjabi (2014) say students who are familiar to cultural content of the target language have better reading comprehension scores than those who lack familiarity to target language cultural content. Since culturally familiar content of language in international and target level increases learners‟ comprehension almost in all skills, textbooks are one of their real manifestations in curriculum.The study also intended to investigate how the content of English textbooks represents national, international and target culturally familiar content for students to be well-prepared to convey their own culture to foreigners as well as to be acquainted with other cultures that they have contact with for any means anywhere in the virtual and real places. Content analysis method was used and a coding scheme was designed according to items listed in Byram‟scultural content checklist (1993). The findings of this qualitative study showed that ELT textbooks covered a restricted range of international cultural content as well as target cultural content; moreover, the result revealed that just restricted amount of national culturally familiar content are applied in the English language textbooks. Based on the results of the study, some directions would be suggested to be appliedin the English language syllabus; moreover, the results can be used by teachers as a direction for adding some supplementary and complementary materials to develop English language textbooks in education for effective communication.

This study sought to investigate the rate of attrition in general and special vocabulary in and out of context. Participants of the study were 210 male Persian literature teachers with different years of non-exposure to English (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 &10) after graduating from university. They were selected through purposive sampling from among 1000 Persian literature teachers from three provinces, namely Esfahan, Fars and Yasuj. Their age ranged between 25 and 35. The instrument included one translation task. The task consisted of 20 items of general words and 20 items of special words which were tested in and out of context.Results indicated that the rate of attrition increased gradually as the years of non-exposure to English increased. Also, it was found that the rate of attrition in special and contextualized lexicon is respectively less than general and de-contextualized lexicon.

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