A wide variety of ELT related materials is available today, mostly on the Internet; nevertheless, coursebooks are predominantly used as the basis for language courses (Ur, 2012). Not only are coursebooks designed for language teaching purposes, as Gray (2001) argues, but they are “highly wrought cultural constructs and carriers of cultural messages” (p. 152). Gray observes that globalisation brought about a new trend on the ELT coursebook market which resulted in the fact that now coursebooks “have been subtly deterritorialized” and that they “now resemble each other, not only in terms of glossy design but also in terms of content” (p. 157). The reason for the unification of global coursebooks lies in the fact that publishers tend to provide their material writers with guidelines about desirable and undesirable content (see the discussion about PARSNIP topics in Section 2.1.3.4) and only include content that is regarded as appropriate, or not likely to offend potential buyers (Gray, 2001). Given that publishers are unlikely to publish material that would be potentially upsetting (Gray, 2000, 2001; Thornbury, 1991) i.e., controversial, it hardly comes as a surprise that present-day global ELT coursebooks do not abound in texts and tasks about global (Melliti, 2013) or environmental issues (Jacobs & Goatly, 2000; Rácz, 2019) or about citizenship (Rácz, 2020). Coursebooks have been criticised for their “small-mindedness” and “superficiality” (Thornbury, 1999, p. 15), their promotion of stereotypes (Pike & Selby, 1988), romanticized perspectives of English-speaking countries (Banegas, 2011), and their deliberate disregard for the representation of marginalized groups, such as the LMBTQ+ community (Thornbury, 1999; Gray, 2001, 2013; Seburn, 2018). However, there have been some changes in the last few decades and authors started to introduce some controversial topics into their coursebooks (Cutting Edge, Cunningham & Moor, 1998 chapters on euthanasia, gun control, and the decriminalisation of drugs, etc.) (Thornbury, 1999). There are also some new series of coursebooks published to promote the global perspective (e.g., The main mission of National Geographic Learning is bringing the real world into the classroom, which is easily observable in their Keynote (Dummet et al., 2019), Life (Dummet et al., 2017), Outcomes (Dellar & Walkley, 2016), and 21st century reading (Blass & Williams, 2016) series). These books are already available in bookshops but are rarely on the list of recommended textbooks, which does not make them an obvious choice as course material. Teachers, most of whom heavily rely on their coursebooks as a basis for their syllabi, would have an easier job if these topics were included in the coursebooks. Then, they would not need extra preparation and they would not need to worry about the audacious nature of introducing something controversial: if the book introduces it, part of the job is already done, and the teacher is hardly responsible for the content.