A GENDER ANALYSIS OF NEW IRANIAN ENGLISH TEXTBOOK IN GRADE SEVEN “ENGLISH FOR SCHOOLS, PROSPECT ONE”

This article tries to investigate the gender stereotypes in the Iranian English textbook of grade 7 junior secondary high school based on the content analysis (i.e. texts, pictures, dialogues, etc.). For this purpose, the author merely pays attention to the student book because it is taught with a work book and one CD. To collect and analyze data, the quantitative and qualitative methods, especially the content analysis are used. The frequency of pictures, dialogues and texts for each gender gives the considerable data and helps the investigator describe numerically the obvious content of relations. Gender is the unit of analysis in the study. The results show that there is often a considerable discrimination between males (men and boys) and females (women and girls) in this textbook. This stereotype is seen in the frequency of names, pictures, jobs, social visibility, appearance, clothing, behaviors and so on. This book was written by six authors that merely one of them is female. According to my own experience, this great gap affects the girl students. Some suggestions are represented which advise the curriculum planners to reform this textbook.