Gender Representation and EFL Textbooks: A Case Study

Abstract

Sociolinguistics is defined as the study of language in the social context. Socio-linguists are interested in both stylistic variation, how in different contexts different individuals speak in different ways, and social variation, how speakers who differ from each other in categories such as age and social class differ from one another in their speech. One topic that has been examined in the last 30 years is the linguistic differences between men and women. This paper is concerned with these differences and how they are represented in current EFL textbooks. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how one current EFL conversation textbook represents gender through linguistic features found in both male and female speech and visual representation of each gender in the text. The text was analyzed for Robin Lakof's (1975) 10 features of female linguistic representation as well as amount of talk, conversational topics, and interruptions. Vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and vocal patterns were all evaluated, as well as firstness, occupation, omission, and visual representation and treatment of males and females. A qualitative analysis based on the preceding criteria found both genders to be linguistically and visually represented in an equal, fair, and positive way.