Volume 3 - Issue 2 - December 2019
Latest issue of Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics
Research Article
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TITLE: Dancing Queen and Big Boys – Gender representation in EFL textbooks for
Primary Schools: A contrastive corpus and critical discourse analysis
Author: Angeliki Lada
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Published online: 24 December 2019, pp. 106-116
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Citation:
Lada, A. (2019) Dancing Queen and Big Boys – Gender representation in EFL textbooks for Primary Schools: A contrastive corpus and critical discourse analysis, Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics, 3(2), ALS House Publications. Athens, Greece, pp. 106-116.
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This paper examines the construction of gender identity in the discourse of EFL textbooks, Grades 4, 5 & 6 in Public Primary Schools in Greece. Regarding the pairs of gendered categories father/dad - mother/mum, boy/s - girl/s, he-she and the extent to which they represent the school’s interest in gender-dependent socialisation, the study addresses the questions of salience, functionalisation and identification. The method of study integrates corpus linguistics of data collection with critical discourse analysis based on Halliday’s (1985) systemic functional model of transitivity and Van Leeuven’s (2008) socio-semantic inventory of exclusion/inclusion categories, role allocation and relational identification. The analysis of the corpus (40,862 word tokens) revealed gender alignments on frequency counts (male entities feature as most prominent by a ratio of one to two), as well as across the semantic domains. This study contributes to classroom interaction in the framework of Critical Language Awareness pedagogy for empowering “Dancing Queens” and “Big Boys” to question the gender bias which might be reflected in their textbooks.
© Applied Language Studies House Publications 2019. All rights reserved.
Keywords: EFL textbooks, Gender representation, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
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