Construction of Gender through Textbooks: The Case of Iranian Junior High School English Textbooks

Abstract

Despite a body of research into gender representation in textbooks for English as a foreign language, little empirical evidence has been published on Iranian English textbooks. To fill this void, the present study examined gender representation and construction in a recently developed Iranian English Language course book series. In so doing, Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis was employed to extract the underlying gender-related ideologies in this series. The results showed that despite Iran’s gender-sensitive education and policy, contemporary Iranian school textbooks in the public sector suffer from gendered role stereotyping, such as favoring males over females in unequal and equal relations, more tangible representation of male roles in topical categories, and the imposition of socially acceptable male and female activities through overrepresentation of subject positions. It was concluded that including gendered perspectives in such textbooks may generate biased ideologies in society. This study should, therefore, be of value to practitioners wishing to develop and implement gender-free textbooks and curricula.