This study attempted to explore the representation of gender in an international ELT series, i.e., American Headway Student Textbooks. Fairclough's ( 2001) three-dimensional model was selected and adopted as the model of study. Effectively, different parts of American Headway Student Textbooks were investigated systematically vis-à-vis eight factors, i.e. female and male's characters, female and male's social roles, female and male's domestic roles, female and male's semantic roles, female and male's titles, order of appearance, masculine generic construction, activities females and males engaged in, and finally the pictorial representation of both genders. The findings of the study revealed that the series are suffering from two types of sexism-overt and covert ones-the overt one discriminates against females in a vivid way and the covert one exploits the women as an instrument for advertising in order to promote selling. This study suggests that the series are instilling capitalism economy as ideology.

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The washback effects of different test formats on the writing performance of students have always been of great importance. However, this area of research has not fully touched upon by researchers of second language testing. Despite the importance of the issue, there is a dearth of empirical studies to unravel the effects of different types of tests on learning. To shed some light on the current issue, the present study intends to look into the washback effects of tests on students who are learning and using some special grammatical points in writing tasks. In order to fulfil this project, we made a set question in three formats of cloze, multiple-choice and metalinguistic on a grammatical form(i.e. present perfect and present perfect continuous)to use after each session of teaching (2 sessions of training) as an activity. The researchers devised and validated three tests on the target form; each test contained 20 questions and was in different formats of cloze, multiple-choice or metalinguistic. At the end of this two-session trainings, two focused writing tasks were implemented. The results indicated that supporting teaching grammatical points with metalinguistic tests yields the highest positive washback on students writing. Finally, some practical implications were suggested.

Abstract-This I. CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: THEORETICAL DEFINITIONSCritical discourse analysis (CDA) is an academic research paradigm aiming to investigate "the power relations, ideological manipulations, and hegemony" (Rahimi & Sahragard, 2007, p.1). CDA indicates what has been formerly known as critical linguistics (CL) (Wodak, 2002) which emerged in the late 1970s (Fowler and Kress, 1979). Critical theory provides a critical perspective or attitude towards society (Rahimi & Sahragard, 2007). Fairclough (1995a) defines critical theory as "any theory concerned with critique of ideology and the effects of domination" (p.20).CDA embarks on deciphering and demystifying both "opaque and transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control" (Wodak, 2007, pp.208-209). Wodak (2001) points out that "CDA sees language as 'social practice' (p. 1), and considers the context of language use to be crucial (Weiss and Wodak, 2003). She assumes three concepts of critique, power, history and ideology as indispensable elements in all CDA.Widdowson (2007) argues that CDA is "particularly concerned (and concerned about) the use (abuse) of language for exercise of socio-political power" (p.70). In other words, critical discourse analysis (CDA) investigates socio-political values and norms. It means that this school scrutinizes not only ideational assumptions but also ideological aspects (Widdowson, 2007). Hence, he assumes CDA as an analytical research method discovering traces of ideological bias in written or spoken texts and campaigning against the ideology as well as beliefs of the ruling system that tries to legitimize their control, power and domination. Accordingly, CDA critically scrutinizes the ideas and assumptions taken for granted trying to keep the status quo. To state the matter differently, CDA investigates the ideas, assumptions or ideologies trying to sustain the inequality and bias between the elites and non-elites and campaigns against these ideas and assumptions (Widdowson, 2007).Halliday's systemic functional linguistics that views language as a social phenomenon is central in practicing any CDA (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999;Fairclough, 2001a;Fairclough, 1995a;Fairclough, 1995b;Hodge & Kress, 1993). Accordingly, viewing language as a social event is the first assumption of CDA. The second main assumption of CDA is related to the speaker's selections of vocabulary as well as grammar that based on Fowler and Kress (1979) is "principled and systematic" (p.188). Fowler and Kress (1979) state that "relation between form and content is not arbitrary or conventional, but… form signifies content" (p.88). It means that the kinds of selections-whether grammatical or lexical-are ideologically-based. In other words, language is a social phenomenon that is laden by ideologies.Wodak (2001) elaborates that the main purpose of CDA is revealing "the opacities in discourse which contribute to the exercise, maintenance, or reproduction of unequal relations of power" (p.258). It means that the a...