critical review of culture related content in iranian junior high school textbooks (prospects 1,2,3): teachers’ perspectives

English language teaching/learning has many important components. one of them,especially for those learning english in non- english speaking countries is textbooks. atextbook is a book used for the study of a subject. people use a textbook to learn facts andmethods about a certain subject. textbooks sometimes have questions to test the knowledgeand understanding of the learner. text book evaluation is of important value for teachers,supervisors, administrators, and materials developers, to name a few. textbooks have beenanalyzed from different perspectives by different researchers. some surveyed their contentscritically, and some investigate the role of textbooks in language learning, and still some othersstudied meticulously the theoretical bases upon which the content of the text books rested, butone of the neglected components of the textbooks which is of paramount importance is culturalcomponent. i mean, how the textbook writers dealt with the culture. did they incorporatemostly home culture or target culture? did they make an attempt to use content that has nocultural load at all? in other words, were they in favor of the elements of target or source culturesolely? or did they strive to be neutral or, to some extent, use the combination of both. thiscontroversy prompted the current investigation into the cultural element of elt textbooks iniran.