Abstract:
This study aims at investigating the linguistic representation of male and female social actors in the Four Corners 4 textbook, drawing on CDA. More specifically, van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework, which highlights the connection of linguistic and social practices, is used as the analytical framework to examine gendered social actors in this English language teaching (ELT) textbook. To this end, content analysis was done to explore the frequency and proportion of each social actor. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis showed that there were some differences, though not statistically significant, between males and females regarding substitution, individualization, and activation. Males, in contrast with females, were included more as active and famous actors in social circumstances and they were more individualized. In addition, they were more activated through circumstantialization and participation. On the other hand, the case of formalization was mostly observed for males. Moreover, males and females were distributed equally in the textbook in terms of classification, genericization, and collectivization. The results reveal that the gender bias still exists, though to a small degree, in this ELT textbook, which is taught as a substitution for the previous ELT textbooks in many language schools in Iran.
Machine summary:
"Besides, Bahman and Rahimi in 2010 conducted a similar study to examine different areas of gender bias in male and female representation in three volumes of high school textbooks.
On the contrary, Karimaghaei and Kasmani (2013), who used van Leeuwen’s model for displaying social actor representation in Top Notch 2A/2B, reported that females were manifested as less successful and intellectual in the Top Notch textbooks and more ordinary jobs were assigned to women than men.
As far as ELT textbooks are used as a channel for transferring information and values, they can "reformulate, neutralize, and legitimize ideologies and construct learners’ world view" (Fairclough, 1992 & van Dijk, 2001); it thus is valuable to evaluate ELT textbooks taught in language schools to find out the possible drawbacks and strong points in terms of social actor gender representation.
The present study then aims to analyze Four Corners 4, the more advanced-level textbook of Four Corners series (Richard & Bohlke, 2012) by relying on van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework, which is one of the most comprehensive models for analyzing the representation of actors from a social perspective.
After computing frequencies and proportions for male and female representations, a series of Chi-square tests of significance was also employed in the present study to examine the significant differences between both genders in terms of the selected categories of van Leeuwen’s model.
Discussion This study was designed to delve into females and males social actor depiction in Four Corners 4 textbook, (Richard & Bohlke, 2012) with respect to van Leeuwen’s (1996) social actor framework."