Gender Representation in Secondary and High School EFL Coursebooks

Abstract

This study investigates representation of male and female characters in the reading texts of English language coursebooks in the Turkish secondary and high school context. In order to examine the gender representation in reading texts, Hallidayan transitivity analysis was used; texts were analysed to to investigate representation of female and male characters as agents and the assignment of experiential processes to these characters. The findings show that as the students move up in their formal education and as the reading texts become more advanced and lengthier, the number of male agents increase radically. In addition, the agents in the most common two processes used in the reading texts are found to be predominantly male, while the remaining three processes identified were distributed between male and female agents more evenly. However, it is also found that there was still a general trend to assign agency to male characters in lengthier and more advanced texts of later years overall. The findings have implications for teachers as well as coursebook writers.

Keywords

• Critical discourse analysis
• gender representation
• systemic functional grammar
• coursebook analysis

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