GENDER REPRESENTATION AND STEREOTYPING IN EFL TEXTBOOKS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study aims to investigate whether writers and publishers take the gender balance into consideration while they are writing the textbooks. It explores the areas of gender disparity in the textbooks taught at Secondary School level in Azad Jammu & Kashmir (henceforth AJ K). To achieve this aim, EFL textbooks by AJK Textbooks Board taught at grade 9th and 10th were analysed. To find out whether there is gender imbalance in textbooks, two methods of data analysis were employed: Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis as proposed by Fairclough (1989). It was found that two ways have been adopted by the author to represent gender in both them textbooks via image and text. Seven categories such as visibility in the illustrations, visibility in the text, topic domination, jobs/ occupations, character traits, household activities, and generic masculine nouns were set to see the representation of each gender. It was also observed that the representations of female and male characters in both the textbooks were closer to the stereotypical representations. The representation of gender is gender imbalance as males were overrepresented in most of the categories while females were stereotypically depicted and marginalized. Female gender is a sub-ordinate to male gender and gender discrimination has been found in all categories of content analysis except household activities. The study provides certain pedagogical implications and recommendations that can help in eradicating the issue of gender inequality in learning material