Textbooks often play a central role in the formal teaching of foreign and second languages, especially at beginning level. To this day, much language teaching is structured by published textbooks, even if it is supplemented with other materials from the Internet or elsewhere. In view of the importance of textbooks in providing learners with their first authoritative glimpses of the target culture, only a little work in applied linguistics has explored issues concerning the choice of cultural content for textbooks. However, the research that has been conducted points to the importance of different ways of representing culture, the ideological dimensions of cultural choices authors make, as well as the variety of methodological perspectives that are useful.