English language teaching, An Opportunity for Spreading Iranian Culture

Language teaching is considered to be a means of spreading cultural values, in the globalization era and it is clear that cultural values are in a close relationship with national identity symbols. Therefore, the focus of this article is on TPFL as a mechanism for dissemination of Iranian Culture and identity. In this study, 3 TPFL textbooks (7 volumes) written by Samara (1371), Zarghamian (1381) and Purnamdarian (1378) has been analyzed on the basis of the quality of their representation of Iranian culture and identity. Accordingly, the present study wants to answer the three following questions: 1- which Iranian cultural values are can be spread through teaching Persian? 2- Which of the Iranian cultural values have been taken into consideration in the selected TPFL text-books? 3- To what extent is paid to each component and cultural value? The study shows that among 35 Iranian cultural values, only 25 of them are used in the studied TPFL textbooks. It seems that less focus is made on components such as science, industry, history, Iranian civilization and religion.