Diversity in Locally-Published ELT Coursebooks

For the majority of English classrooms, the coursebook is the main instructional material. For some contexts, they are the only source for the students. This makes us have a closer look into the content of the coursebooks. Being the main source of information for the students, how coursebooks present or depict the world to the students through their contents is an important point to be considered. The aim of the present study is to analyse the textual and visual content of the locally-published coursebooks to reveal how the concepts of family, gender, ethnicity, disability, and age are presented. To this end, locally-published coursebooks from six different contexts were chosen to be analysed: Count Me in 12 (Türkiye), Access 6 (Germany), English, Please! 2 (Colombia), English with Smiling Sam 4 (Ukraine), English 8 (Chile), and Way to English 6 (Brazil). Locally-published coursebook were chosen as Ministries of National Education have an authority on the development process of these instructional materials. For the selection of the contexts, by taking the accessibility of the local coursebooks as a criterion, the different and diverse contexts were selected to add variety to the data. Adopting a qualitative approach, diversity pedagogy and critical coursebook analysis suggested by Alter (2020) were taken as a framework for the data analysis. The results were presented under the titles of “family structure, gender, ethnicity, disability, and ageism” and were discussed in line with the related literature.