Gender Representation & Language Textbooks: A Study on Private School Textbooks of English Language at Secondary Level

Abstract

The English language is considered to be the lingua franca and connecting language worldwide; therefore, it gained recognition as a second language far and wide. With the help of language learning, novel norms, dogmas, and morals of an individual are cultivated. Henceforth, language textbooks should advocate culturally, politically, and gender balanced ideas in a way that influences learners in a constructive approach. Textbooks are fabricators of personality that draw students’ attention towards their content. The investigation on gender representation and language textbooks is done in order to investigate the depiction of females in language textbooks that are taught at private schools.  This study is meant to investigate how authors of language textbooks employ naming/ word level, notion of transitivity, and discourse in describing male and female genders. The research is qualitative and descriptive in nature, and the source of data collection is language textbooks published by Oxford University Press, editors taught at grade-9 & 10. The study revealed that transitivity choices made by authors were favouring male; characters of both books were male in the majority, and gender bias can be seen through the professions allocated to males and females. The present investigation is limited to English language textbooks at grade-9 & 10 only. This study suggests that there is a lot of necessity to work on the gender bias in schoolbooks and they should be planned in a way that embodies gender sociable content. The current investigation is significant for policy proposers, the government of Sindh, the curricula committee, and textbook designers.