Multicultural Education through ELT Textbooks: Developing a Checklist for English Materials Evaluation Based on Multiculturalism (The Journal of Curriculum and Evaluation; Vol. 20, No. 4)

 Multicultural education is recommended as an effort to resolve significant social challenges in Korea. This is reflected in the 2015 reform of national curriculum and instruction as it promotes cultural diversity and competence. As English textbooks are widely used in EFL classrooms in Korea by both students and teachers, it is useful to examine how much English textbooks are multiculturalism-friendly and -responsive. This study has 3 parts: 1) It makes a critical review of previous research on English textbooks evaluation checklists, 2) it then synthesizes them and proposes a new tentative multiculturalism-based criteria for English textbooks evaluation, and finally, 3) it applies the new subset of the criteria to an English textbook used in EFL classrooms in Korea to test its validity and practicality. Developing a multiculturalism-responsive criteria for English textbooks evaluation will provide multiculturalism-friendly classroom environments in which EFL learners can grow not only linguistically but also 'multiculturally'.