A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family and Friends Textbooks: Representation of Genderism

The present study employed a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to investigate the linguistic representation of male and female social actors in Family and Friends 4, 5 and 6. To this end, van Leeuwen’s (1996) representational framework and Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) Transitivity Theory Model were adopted to reveal the ideology behind the constructions. The findings indicated a “sexist attitude” in favor of male social actors in which males were portrayed more than females and also had high activity. In addition, it was revealed that there was attempt to avoid traditional stereotypes of females in most parts of textbooks and women were not portrayed at home as housewives engaged in child care, however, it can be claimed that they suffered most obviously from low visibility. The findings may help EFL teachers, material developers and policy makers to be aware of equality/inequality issues in textbooks in order to make an equality perspective to learners.