A Discursive Analysis on Gender Biased Issues in the International ELT Textbooks

Although textbook is one of the traditional ELT material that playacts an authentic hazardous character in all English language classrooms, in the latest decades there has been a lot of controversies all over the ELT business on the real role of mediums in teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Other points that have appeared in these years encompass textbook designs and practicality, the authenticity of materials in terms of the appropriateness and equality of gender representation, and cultural components. This research is an attempt to scrutinize the representational method of genders in English learning book series, i.e., Face 2 Face Student Textbooks. To reach this end, of the four volumes of the English textbook series “Face 2 Face” were studied with a stress on the representation rate of male and female characters by conducting the content analysis of gender attributed lexicon such as names, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to see if the two genders are equally distributed. Chi-squares based on five factors (female vs. male’s characters, titles, order of appearance, engaging activities and, pictorial representation) as well as gender representation in conversation accomplished to determine the proportion and frequency of the male vs. female discrimination. The findings revealed that this series is significantly bearing sexism; Male is more foregrounded than female. Comparing with females, males are outstanding in many ways such as independence, status and occupations.