The Future of Education

This study attempted to explore the status of linguistic sexism in the current Iranian high school EFL textbooks (four volumes) published by the Iranian Ministry of Education in 2014. In the state schools in Iran, textbooks are the only resource for majority of both teachers and students therefore, unbiased textbooks are necessary for students to build up their role in addressing the other gender in their lives and society. As it is noted by the Iranian Ministry of Education, the number of female students who are currently studying in the school is almost equal to that of the males. Therefore, it seemed necessary to find out whether both genders are treated unbiased in the high school EFL textbooks or not. This study is a quantitative content analysis which was carried out to investigate whether both genders (in terms of pronouns, title names and firstness) have been addressed equally or not. There have been a few studies earlier in Iran regarding this issue but they have not used software to minimize the human error and maximize the validity of the results. Having digitalized the textbooks, WordSmith Tool 4 tabulated the data then percentages were calculated for better interpretation.

The findings show that in the textbooks, of the total ‘he’ occurs 642 times (69%) and ‘she’ occurs 288 times (31%). The ratio of pronoun ‘She’ to ‘He’ is 1 to more than 2. Similarly, the ratio of possessive adjective ‘her’ to ‘his’ is 1 to more than 2. The findings also highlight that the ratio of male title names (Mr.) to female ones (Mrs. & Ms.) in the textbooks is 4 to 1. Based on the findings, there are 11 instances of ‘Firstness’ occurrences in the textbooks from which 9 (82%) are ‘Male then Female’ and the rest (18%) are ‘Female then Male’ group which do not treat both genders equally and are biased toward males. The roles of females and their realistic contributions to the society are not well represented in the textbooks. Some implications are advised for teachers, textbook writers and policy makers.

Keywords: Linguistic Sexism, EFL/ESL Textbooks, Hidden Curriculum, Firstness.