Abstract:
Course books play a crucial role in educational process and are believed to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching. Every new textbook needs to be analyzed in order to reach its best. Hence this study aims to analyze three Iranian English course books to reveal how various cultures are shown via the course books characters’ race, nationality, gender, and intercultural communications. The inspection of the course books revealed unequal cultural representations with the dominance of white and male characters. Furthermore, regarding the intercultural interactions, most examples included conversations among Iranians in a superficial level of cultural engagement. It was also found that males’ roles are more highlighted throughout the series. Hence, in some cases, the leading ideology floating in this series is prototyping the Iranian-Islamic culture and values by means of English. Overall, this series seemed to suffer from biased embedded ideologies in terms of presenting cultures, races and genders. The findings of this study are of great help for language teachers, language learners, textbook developers, and curriculum developers to adopt an international position toward education.
Machine summary:
Keywords: Culture, English textbooks, gender, racial dominance Introduction Course books play a major role in teaching process and are alleged to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching (See; McDonough et al.
As a result of several criticisms proposed against former high school EFL textbooks (Farhady, 2000; Rahimi, 1996; Rashidi, 1995; Razmjoo & Riazi, 2006; Yarmohammadi, 2000), Vision 1, 2, and 3, as the second three parts of the six-volume series of English for high school students, have been authored in accordance with Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) principles by the Ministry of Education (Alavi-Moghaddam et al.
How are cultural, racial and gender dominance reflected in Iranian senior high school English course books?
At the first step in this model of analysis, characters’ race and nationality, English varieties and Intercultural Interactions, and gender representation in the conversations of the textbooks are extracted and compared to gain profound perceptions into the part played by ideology in the Vision series.
Data Analysis This study was basically conducted to reveal latent cultural, racial and gender-based ideologies embedded in Iranian junior high school EFL textbooks.
By and large, the results of the present study correlates well with other studies in terms of overemphasis of this series on Iranian social and cultural values (Amerian & Esmaili, 2015; Bahman & Rahimi, 2010; Baleghizadeh & Jamali Motahed 2010; Lee & Mahmoudi-Gahrouei, 2020), which is an important point that course book developers should be aware of.
Gender representation in EFL materials: an analysis of English textbooks of Iranian high schools.