Analysing Cultural Elements in L2 Mandarin Textbooks for Malaysian Learners

Culture is an important aspect of foreign or second language education as the teaching of foreign languages straddles two languages, the learner's first language and the target/foreign language, and the different cultures associated with them. Textbooks for the teaching of foreign languages must inevitably orient to cultural elements from at least two cultural practices and environments. In this study, cultural elements in four Mandarin as a second language textbooks written for Malaysian learners were examined using content analysis. Cultural elements and categorisations of types of culture were employed to investigate the extent to which cultural elements (knowledge-culture or communicative-culture) and types of culture (source, target, international cultures, or intercultural interaction) were represented in these textbooks. The study revealed that both knowledge-culture and communicative-culture were present in the sampled textbooks. Communicative-culture was found to be explicitly represented in the textbooks. For knowledge-culture, however, there was an imbalance in the representation of the Big 'C' and small 'c' elements. Further, the sampled textbooks placed more emphasis on target culture, and feature localisation rather than internationalisation. Regarding diversity, there was only a slight representation of learners' diverse cultural backgrounds. The findings of the study provide insight into how cultural elements are incorporated into L2 Mandarin textbooks for Malaysian learners and may contribute to wider issues concerning the use of appropriate learning materials for developing cultural competence for L2 learners in a multicultural context.