Abstract
The critical analysis of images or visual texts, as an emerging and adapted version of critical discourse analysis (CDA), can contribute to distinguish bias or fair gender manifestation. The rationale behind this study is that little systematic and exhaustive studies have been conducted with an eye towards investigating images solely in EFL textbooks. To offset this imbalance, this paper adopted Fairclough’s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social semiotic analysis (SSA) framework by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to interrogate the extent and types of gender bias in the Four Corners series, the commercially-produced English language textbooks (Richards and Bohlke, 2012). By adopting a quantitative and qualitative design, image typologies were tallied, girded and tabulated to see how the probable and hidden portrayal image patterns had been rendered for both genders. The results revealed over-representation persists in all the textbook series in certain degrees for both genders and while a textbook series might over-represent one gender it does not necessarily imply that the individual textbook over-represents the same gender.
Highlights
Gender and LanguageGender and Language is a relatively new discipline within sociolinguistics, usually said to be identified by the seminal work of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975
The findings further revealed that male gender outnumber the female gender in usage of characters depicted in illustrations, photographs, names and titles used to refer to the genders
In 53.3 % of the cases, males were presented as active participants of the images while females were presented in 50.6 % of the cases (Figure 1)
Summary
Gender and LanguageGender and Language is a relatively new discipline within sociolinguistics, usually said to be identified by the seminal work of Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975. Language and gender scholars seek to show that language was a fundamental means of constructing gender discrepancies, and inequalities between men and women. Two aspects emerged in language and gender research; first, how women and men talked, and second, how both genders were represented in language. Ideological studies have a common concern to probe how people’s identities are constructed in gendered ways within localized ‘communities of practice’, and in relation to larger gendered discourses (Sunderland, 2004). While the gender-based studies have been modified since the 1970s in lieu of developments in women’s status, there is, a broad unanimity among scholars that gender continues to be considerably relevant to the way people interact via language, and in the way they are positioned and represented by gendered discourses or ways of seeing the world. As Holmes (2001) holds it ‘gender has stabilized as a term to distinguish people in terms of their socio-cultural behavior and to typify masculine and feminine conducts as continua rather than as a dichotomy’
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