Abstract This study aimed at evaluating representation of culture and identity in English Vision textbooks for Iranian secondary public education. Frequency counts, corpus analysis and content analysis were followed to collect and analyze the data. The research instruments consisted of researcher-made checklists. In order to investigate cultural representation, cultural references as well as the cultural senses were counted and frequencies were obtained. Also, corpus analysis and content analysis were carried out, respectively aimed at providing a description of the terms associated with nationalities, and describing aspects of national identity represented in the textbooks. Results of the frequency counts indicated that the Vision ELT textbooks contained the most cultural content associated with Persian as the source culture. Similarly, the focus was primarily on the esthetic sense of culture, followed respectively by semantic, sociological and sociolinguistic (pragmatic) senses. Likewise, results revealed that Iranian identity is the most frequently referenced, for which 13 different categories of reference were observed. Similarly, six major themes were found regarding aspects of national identity corresponding to Smith’s (1991, 2001) framework. Further, content analysis showed that the religious aspect of Iranian-Islamic debate over Iranian national identity has been represented more frequently, compared with the national aspect. The study ends up with implications for EFL stake-holders as well as education policy-makers in the Iranian context. Keywords: ELT, Local Textbooks, Cultural content, National identity representation, Iranian context, Vision textbook series
