the correspondence ‎of culture and creativity: a case of struggle between localized and internationalized elt textbooks

Creativity and culture are two intertwined but most unexplored phenomena in language and ‎linguistic discipline, especially in english textbooks’ domains. hence, the purpose of the study ‎was 1) to investigate the existence and distribution of cultural and creativity‏-‏related contents in ‎two elt textbooks based on cortazzi and jin (1999) textbook classification and ‎ investment ‎theory of creativity, and 2) to examine the confluence of creativity components and culture‏ ‏elements. using basic content analysis, the researcher analyzed the creative components and ‎cultural elements of two elt textbooks prepared and utilized in iran (localized textbook) and ‎the uk (internationalized textbook). the researcher found that the elt textbooks of iran ‎‎(prospect 1) and the uk (teen2teen 1) both included components of creativity. in iranian ‎prospect 1, knowledge was the most prominent element, but in the internationalized teen2teen 1 ‎‎(uk) book, intelligence, motivation, environment, and personality were mostly observed. ‎furthermore, the findings revealed that in the localized textbook (prospect 1), except for source ‎products, the other elements of culture, such as persons, practice, and perspectives, are absent. ‎on the other hand, in internationalized teen2teen book 1, the global products of culture are ‎mostly presented, and the other elements, such as persons, practice, and perspectives, are ‎underrepresented. thus, this study’s findings can help policy makers, material designers and ‎teachers to modify the content of elt textbooks to obtain better advantages.‎