EFL learners’ cultural available lexicon: The effect of ELT textbooks

Abstract

This research compares the cultural types elicited by twenty-nine EFL undergraduate students in response to two prompts from a lexical availability task (i.e. food and drink and countryside) and the cultural input provided by four last year High School ELT textbooks used in La Rioja. Cultural words were classified in terms of their frequency of appearance by means of Range and listed according to a framework of cultural topics (Risager, 1991; Byram, 1993; Byram & Morgan, 1994; Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, 2001). Finally, the words produced by the learners as well the input provided by the textbooks were associated with the culture they represented i.e. source, target and international culture. Our findings reveal that the number of words related to culture either elicited by students or included in the ELT textbooks is low. Most of the words students and textbooks provided belong to everyday living and international is the most representative culture in the study.