An Investigation On Sexism In EFL Textbooks In Senior Middle School

Sexism in EFL textbooks is one of the major research targets in the field of English teaching and reforming. Textbooks are authorized by national education agency to be major teaching materials used in schools. The culture of teaching materials embodied in textbooks assimilates and spreads the authoritative system of concepts, knowledge and values of a certain society. Textbooks serve as an essential source for students to receive knowledge, acquire language skills, and accept social norms and values.Under the framework of CDA, this thesis attempts to make a case study of Advance with English (Student's Book), the widely used and accepted set of EFL textbooks in Jiangsu, which is newly published by the prestigious publishing house in China. This thesis intends to unveil the hidden sexism in Advance with English by way of content analysis as well as linguistic analysis, and then to explore the relationship between sexism and power distribution and to specifically present how sexism is realized by means of micro-analytical tools of CDA. The research findings show that sexism is widespread and prevalent in this set of EFL textbooks as to the following aspects:(1) Females are generally underrepresented both as ordinary people and as outstanding people.(2) Females are far less visible than males in occupational roles and assigned with limited variety of occupations. Occupations for females are often restricted to traditional service and entertainment jobs, while males are portrayed in respected and skillful occupations.(3) There are 288 masculine generic constructions used extensively, although writers and compilers have made attempts to avoid the masculine generic to some extent by using nonsexist constructions. However, these attempts are often inconsistent, even in the same unit or text.(4) Male firstness is almost twice as much as female firstness, which implies that females are thought of inferior to males.(5) The frequencies of exclusive nouns and the addressing terms for females and males both signal that females are often identified by their family relations while males' identity generally lies in their professional capacity.(6) Classification shows that there is still the traditional sex stereotype existing in outstanding females and males in that females have to rely on others' sympathy or compassion in order to win their reputation in spite of their own courage and bravery in misfortunes or sufferings, while males are expected to get success by means of their own strength and ability without help and assistance from others. The case study in transitivity shows that males are placed as Actor, while females are put on the place of Goal. This indicates that males are positive in life and they take great initiative in both fighting against difficulties and realizing their ambitions, while females are resigned to their given fate, unable to get out of the command of their destiny. The study of normalization of characters implies that males are likely to enjoy good personalities or achieve great accomplishments while females seldom share the same preference as males. Instead of case study in the above mentioned three CDA analytical tools, the quantitative research of direct speech and indirect speech in the category of modality reveals that females are confined to family domain while males can occupy diversity of occupations and make great contributions in their occupational fields, especially those involving high technology or much labor.This thesis reveals sexism in EFL textbooks from a quite new way of CDA. Instead of simple representation of sexism, this thesis attempts to waken people's critical awareness on the content in textbooks and to compile sex-equitable and "healthy" textbooks, in order to have a positive effect on learners' gender socialization and finally realize sex-equality in society.