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Makale Özeti:
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The current study aimed at investigating the nature of EFL teachers and learners’ perspectives on the
intercultural competence potentiality of an EFL textbook, i.e. Top Notch Series, which is used extensively
in Iranian institutional EFL context. To this end, forty EFL teachers and eighty-eight advanced EFL
learners from private language institutes of Kermanshah, Kurdistan and Hamadan provinces took a
researcher-made textbook evaluation questionnaire including thirty eight 5-point Likert scale items. The
questionnaire was designed to assess the text in terms of four factors of cultural awareness, cultural
knowledge and attitude, intercultural skills, and cross-cultural understanding. The face and content
validity of the questionnaire was verified by the experts in the field. In addition, using Cronbach’s Alpha
coefficient, the reliability of the questionnaire was estimated to be α=0.87 in this study. The results of
Frequency analyses indicated that both EFL teachers and learners were satisfied with the overall
intercultural competence potentiality of the textbook. However, MANOVA analyses revealed that EFL
teachers and learners’ perspectives on the text’s potential for creating cultural awareness, cultural
knowledge and attitude, intercultural skills, and cross-cultural understanding were significantly
different. The EFL learners believed that the textbook covers the aforementioned factors well enough,
whereas, the teachers believed that it falls short of sufficient attention to the factors. Furthermore, the
results suggested that cross-cultural understanding receives scant attention in Top Notch series.
Findings of the this study can be specially illuminating for all of the stakeholders of Lingua Franca
pedagogy who pursue the development of intercultural competence through language education, in
general, and language teaching materials, in particular.
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