Design decisions on the cultural content of a secondary English course for Morocco

This paper discusses the choices made in a large scale textbook project concerning the cultural content of the new English course for Moroccan secondary schools. We look first at the different meanings of ‘culture’ in foreign language teaching; at the possible arguments for including a foreign cultural component in an English course designed for a national market in a non-anglophone country; and at the means of conveying this cultural component. The paper then suggests an idealized procedure for deciding on the cultural content of a course, and goes on to apply this procedure to the Moroccan case, outlining the solutions adopted. In conclusion, it is suggested that what should really determine these choices is not the top-down strategy that has been presented, but rather the prevailing attitude towards the foreign culture among teachers of English. For in our opinion, it is teachers’ attitudes to a language textbook that most of all determine its effectiveness and its useful life-span.1