Abstract:

Although foreign language education is mainly based on four basic skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking), culture is also regarded as an integral part of it. In other words, language teaching and culture teaching cannot be separated from eac other. How people who speak a language think and behave, how they perceive the events and situations may be understood from the words that those people use, and all these are the components of what is referred to as culture. For this reason, cultural elements and values should be incorporated into the course content of all levels while teaching a language. This study aims to investigate how often the Menschen B1.1 German coursebook deals with cultural elements of the target language. In this study, the content analysis method was adopted by using "Target culture checklist that can be used in foreign language coursebooks" created by Saraç and Arıkan (2010). The checklist consists of two sub-scales and thirty-one items. The results of the study revealed that the Menschen B1.1 coursebook contains many items in the checklist, however, it does not meet the certain items. It was found that the coursebook mainly deals with sub-cultural elements, while it does not include sub-titles such as literature, science, and film.

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