A synchronic study on gender voices in an 8th grade ELT coursebook prepared for Turkish elementary students

The aim of this study is to investigate how females and males are represented in a currently used 8th grade coursebook which was designed by the Ministry of National Education to meet the English language needs of Turkish students. Considering the fact that educational materials play a significant role in children?s development of gender identity, the present study further aims to create awareness about the importance of gender mainstreaming among teachers and coursebook writers. Critical Discourse Analysis covering a content analysis and discourse analysis was employed to reveal any possible points contrary to gender mainstreaming in both texts and visuals. With a view to see how femininity and masculinity are represented in the coursebook, the following categories were set for the content analysis: sex visibility, domestic roles, occupations, spare time activities and interests and personality traits. It also investigates whether gender-related ideologies and government policies are reflected in the female and male characters. Besides, linguistic ways which convey sexist attitudes such as generic constructions, order of mention and address forms are investigated. To bring into the open any possible power relation asymmetries between opposite sexes, a discourse analysis was applied to all the speech acts employed in the fourteen sex-mixed dialogues in the coursebook. The findings reveal that the analysed coursebook exhibits fairly egalitarian representations of both females and males in terms of visibility, spare time activities and interests, personality traits, gender ideologies, linguistic ways such as generic construction, and speech acts. However, some imbalances detectable in especially domestic roles, occupations, order of mention in sex pairs and address forms suggest that gender-related stereotypes are still unconsciously reinforced, and thus there is still room for improvement in the coursebook.