A Sexism and Cultural Content Analysis of Vision and Touchstone Series

The interconnection of culture and gender in educational textbooks has been highlighted in the field of textbook evaluation. The current study aimed at investigating the representation of culture and gender in the Touchstone and Vision series. Specifically, the cultural content of the books was investigated based on Byram et al.’s (۱۹۹۴) framework of intercultural communicative competence, which categorizes culture into social identity, social interaction, belief and behavior, socio-political institutions, socialization, national history, geography, heritage, and stereotypes. Furthermore, gender representation was analyzed through the lens of Fairclough’s (۲۰۰۱) three-dimensional critical discourse analysis model, focusing on text, discursive practice, and social practice to uncover underlying gender ideologies. Results indicated that in the Vision series, gender was primarily represented through pictorial representations, activities, social and domestic roles, the ratio of females to males, and masculine generic construction. However, in the Touchstone series, gender was illustrated in semantic roles, activities, pictorial representations, ratio of females to males, social and domestic roles, and titles. It was also found that there was a significant difference between the Vision and Touchstone series in terms of culture and gender representation. Ultimately, these findings suggest that it can assist writers and material developers in becoming more conscious of the presence of sexism in written EFL/ESL textbooks and minimizing the sexism context in their textbooks. It can also inform language teachers and learners about the appropriate selection of texts by the course book developer’s checklist.

کلیدواژه ها:

content analysis ، culture ، EFL Textbooks ، Gender ، Sexism