The Representation of Gender in ELT materials: Is There a Gender Egalitarian Attitude

Despite so many researches which have been done on the issue of gender in ELT textbooksand the essential role of conversations as a source of natural language, little has beenfocused on analyzing conversational topics from the perspective of gender in ELTtextbooks. In the light of this gap, the present study investigated gender representation inconversations of ELT textbooks regarding three aspects of gender orientation, the topic ofconversations, and distribution of male and female interlocutors. To this end, an aggregateof 108 conversations from three ELT textbooks commonly used in Iran, namely Top Notch,Interchange and Touchstone series were randomly selected. Then, gender orientation wasexamined by quantifying the frequency of same-gender and mixed-gender orientedconversations. Subsequently, through the qualitative analysis, different conversationaltopics were listed based on the Tomlinson’s (2003) topic classification of ELT textbooksand the relationship between gender orientations and topic of the conversations wasexplored. Finally, the quantitative analysis and comparison was followed by calculating thefrequency of males and females in conversations throughout three textbooks and alsoacross three levels of language proficiency. The results indicated that conversations intextbooks are mostly mixed-gender oriented, while there is a balance between male-maleand female-female conversations. Moreover, gender orientation extremely influences thetopic of conversation. Furthermore, a balanced representation of males and females inconversations is conveyed throughout three levels of textbooks. Finally, implications of thefindings for ELT material developers, language teachers, and practitioners are discussed.

Keywords:

ELT textbook development , gender-equitable education , ELT conversations