Gender Representations in High School Efl Coursebooks: An Investigation of Job and Adjective Attributions

Abstract

Gender-biased representations in coursebooks have the potential to affect learners and teacher in terms of their attitudes, mindsets, and values. Considering the crucial importance of the coursebooks in Turkish educational context, the present study aims to shed light on the distribution of the gender roles in the coursebooks by examining job and adjective attributions. Within the scope of this aim, the data of the study consist of high school EFL coursebooks and workbooks published by the Turkish Ministry of National Education. In the data analysis procedure, a frequency count was done to identify a number of roles attributed to female and male characters. In this respect, the frequencies of jobs and adjective attributions of male and female characters were determined by counting the tokens. In the following step, jobs and adjectives attributed to female and male characters are classified and compared. As a result of the analysis, female and male characters in the coursebooks differ from each other in terms of both the number and variety of jobs attributed to them in spite of some similar jobs (e.g., teacher, doctor, architect) and adjectives (e.g., famous, thoughtful, successful) attributed to both genders. The possible reasons underlying the aforementioned differences are discussed and explained in detail by taking the Turkish educational and social setting into consideration.

An Investigation of Lexical Cohesion on Indonesian Singer Song

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Gender Representation in Secondary and High School EFL Coursebooks

“…In the same context, a later study found that both male and female characters were represented equally in high school English coursebooks and there was an equal distribution of physical activities between both genders (Demir & Yavuz, 2017). However, both Demir and Yavuz (2017) and Söğüt (2018) found an unequal distribution of jobs among male and female characters in the English coursebooks at Turkish high school level. It was also found that the jobs assigned to females were what could stereotypically be regarded female jobs such as nurse or waitress (Söğüt, 2018) and that male characters were assigned a wider variety of jobs than female characters (Demir & Yavuz, 2017).…”

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