Abstract
Gender stereotyping in educational materials (especially in EFL textbooks) has been a common theme in linguistic research (cf., e. g., Hellinger 1980; Porreca 1984; Freebody/Baker 1987; Sunderland 1994; Lee/Collins 2010). However, very little attention has been paid to the representation of men and women in EFL/ESL grammar textbooks; i. e. the way both genders are portrayed in constructed examples of usage and practice sentences. The present contribution is intended to fill this gap. The paper investigates the scope of gender stereotyping from a diachronic perspective: it seeks to demonstrate whether and how the images of men and women have changed following the dissemination of guidelines for non-sexist language and equal treatment of the two genders in English language educational materials. To this aim, two corpora have been compiled. The first one includes sentences derived from three EFL textbooks published in the 1970s and 1980s, while the other one contains analogous data from three 21st century titles. The contrastive analysis of the sentences in the two corpora across 11 semantic domains has found that the recently published grammar textbooks portray the two genders in a much less stereotyped way than the 20th century course books.
Highlights
Stereotype as a theoretical construct has been frequently approached by linguists concerned with the relationship between language and gender. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak and Pawelczyk (2006: 350–351), drawing on the views of Wright and Taylor (2003), argue that stereotypes, being ungrounded empirically, should not be viewed in terms of descriptions but interpretations that apply to social groups
2 Gender stereotyping in educational materials: an overview of research
It seems that gender stereotyping may even be more pervasive in EFL grammar textbooks than in integrated skills course books
Summary
Stereotype as a theoretical construct has been frequently approached by linguists concerned with the relationship between language and gender. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak and Pawelczyk (2006: 350–351), drawing on the views of Wright and Taylor (2003), argue that stereotypes, being ungrounded empirically, should not be viewed in terms of descriptions but interpretations that apply to social groups (not individuals). Two institutions seem to be the most responsible for the transmission of gender stereotypes: the media and the educational systems (naturally, the degree of this influence varies cross-culturally). As regards the latter, gender bias is said to be reinforced by a wide range of educational resources. While many of the previous studies of linguistic sexism in educational resources have focused on the unfair portrayal of women or their invisibility, this paper will try to show that in actuality both genders can be affected by negative or positive stereotyping
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