This study has sought to investigate the Oriental vs. Western culture-bound referential items reflected in Top Notch series in terms of Kachru’s (e.g., 1985, 1988) concentric circles. The analysis was conducted sentence by sentence in order to extract the focused items in terms of ten cultural factors proposed by Newmark (1988): ‘Ecology’, ‘Food’, ‘Clothes’, ‘Houses and towns’, ‘Transport’, ‘Work and leisure’, ‘Politics and administration’, ‘Religion’, ‘Gesture and habits’, and ‘Artistics’. To this end, van Dijk’s (2000) ‘Ideological Square’ was adopted as the framework of analysis in order to examine the frequency of the culture-bound items referring to the Oriental vs. Western culture to uncover the ideological orientations lying in the textual content of the textbook series under investigation. The results revealed that the majority of the extracted items signal the power, superiority, and dominance of Western culture, practiced explicitly or implicitly via textbooks published in the Western countries – that is, in the “Inner- Circle”. In addition, the discursive analysis of the texts suggests some traces of Western cultural dominance and cultural imperialism in terms of what has been suggested by Phillipson (1992) in the series of the textbooks.

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