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This study examines the multicultural contents in two international textbooks entitled New Interchange Fifth Edition used in Indonesia for English foreign language (EFL) students to underlying the multicultural values. Applying Kachru and Nelson’s model of English and their categorization into Inner, Outer and Expanding circles. This study also implemented both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis refers to the quantitative data and to what extent multicultural values of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, social class, and people with are represented. The result showed that the representation of culture from three circles countries were unbalanced and stereotypical. The percentage shows from materials representation of inner, outer and expanding circles were 74,1 %, 23,3 % and 2,6% respectively. There were highly dominated inner circle culture even though these textbooks are used in expanding circles (e.g., Indonesia). Anchored from the research finding, it suggest that both textbook writers and designers should emphasized on balance multicultural values in international textbook materials particularly in expanding circle country (e.g. Indonesia) in order to help students recognize the cultural diversity.

Situated in character-based education, the Indonesian Government mandates all teachers to incorporate moral values into school subjects. Teaching English to young learners (TEYL) is no exception. Little empirical evidence reports how school textbooks (e.g., language textbooks) discursively teach particular values explicitly and implicitly. To validate whether English for young learners (EYL) textbooks teach particular moral values, the present critical discourse study (CDA) reported in this article examines how moral content is discursively infused into EYL textbooks. Framed in Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory, it looks specifically at how particular moral values are represented in three nationally-adopted EYL textbooks through lexical choices, the representation of images, and selected texts that the textbook writers use to represent their attitudinal discourse. The findings show that the value of helping others is predominantly represented in the textbooks. The other dominant values encapsulated in the textbooks include politeness and caring. We conclude that the textbook writers place greater emphasis on such values as helping others, being polite, and caring in the textbooks in as much as they may want to teach these values at an early age.

Using a digital story to teach English to pupils in primary schools is not a new enterprise in the field of TESOL. However, this learning platform remains under-practiced in Asian primary schools where English is socio-politically viewed as a foreign language. To fill this gap, we implemented digital storytelling (DST) to engage children in the creation of digital stories and in learning to mean in a multimodal way. This article specifically describes our experience of using DST as pedagogical innovation with pupils of 10-12 years old. In this DST project, pupils jointly created digital stories as multimodal texts. In this respect, they utilized different linguistic resources (e.g., Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and English) as well as visual and technological affordances, which assisted them in voicing their real-life experience through digital stories. The practical implication of the project is that primary school teachers of English can experiment with DST to engage pupils in meaningful project-based language learning.