I am a full-time teacher and teacher trainer of English as a Foreign Language and have worked in the field for over ten years. I have a Masters degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL and am involved in ongoing research in these disciplines, specialising in teaching young learners and teenagers. I also hold a first degree in Chemistry and Management and work as a part-time researcher.

Examine a course book to see how gender roles and / or sexuality are portrayed. Are the women fixed in stereotypical roles? Is there any evidence of normative gender roles and / or sexuality being challenged or subverted?

It has been claimed that course books’ representation of gender can potentially affect language learners in the same way as mass media such as TV, movies, newspapers and children’s books can have an unconscious influence on audience as agents of socialisation (Sunderland, 1992). It is therefore important that EFL teachers review their teaching materials for the gender-related attitudes they portray.

Porreca’s study (1984) described three ways in which sexism can be seen in EFL course books, by omission, the concept of ‘firstness’ and occupational roles.

He describes omission as ‘When females do not appear as often as males in the text (as well as in the illustrations which serve to reinforce the text), the implicit message is that women’s accomplishments, or that they themselves as human beings, are not important enough to be included.’ (1984:706).

Firstness is described as ‘given two nouns paired for sex, such as male / female, the masculine word always comes first, with the exception of the pair ladies / gentlemen’ (1984:706).

Occupational roles or occupational visibility for males and females can be judged ‘to what extent do textbooks contain a wide variety of occupations for men and a limited range of occupational roles for females.’ (1984:706).

Using these three points, I have analysed the course book Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate, a course book aimed at international young adults learning English. Because of space restrictions only the first unit has been analysed for the following points:

• Number of occurrences of male / female characters in the text and illustrations
• Number of occurrences of males / females appearing first in dialogues and exercises
• The occupational roles in which males / females appear.

Male / Female Occurrences
In unit 1, 7 named characters appear in the text and a further 12 take part in dialogues but are not named. Of these 19 characters, 10 are male and 9 are female.

57 people occur in images in the first unit, of which 35 are male and 22 female. However, this number is distorted due to one image portraying a large group of men in an all-male bath house. If this image is counted as one male, the ratio is 26:22 male to female, showing that males are portrayed insignificantly more often in the text (a difference of one) and more significantly often in the images accompanying the text.

There are six recordings accompanying the first unit of the book. Recordings 1, 3, 4 and 6 are monologues giving answers to quiz questions (1), showing pronunciation of questions (3 and 6) and describing the life of sports people (4). In these recordings a male and female voice alternate between each section of the recording which should mean a balanced occurrence of male / female voices. However, as the male voice always begins, if there is an odd number of sections the male speaks more, as in recording 4 where there are three longer monologues. This means the amount of male talk is larger than the amount of female talk.

In the grammar section about the present simple, all the example sentences given include the masculine pronoun he, for example

He earns about $25,000 a week.

In the subsequent practice section, of the twelve sentences, three include female pronouns, seven male pronouns and two include both male and female.

Firstness
In a section where students are asked to prepare questions in order to find out if statements are true about their teacher, the male pronoun always appears first.

He / She gets up before eight o’clock at weekends.
            His / her birthday is in August.

Also, in preparing a fact file one of the sections is hero / heroine, the masculine word again appearing first. There are no instances of the feminine word appearing first.

As stated previously, in recordings 1, 3, 4 and 6 the male voice begins the recording. Recordings 2 and 5 are dialogues, also including a male voice to begin each recording. Recording 2 contains 3 dialogues, one male to male, one female to female and one male to female. Recording 5 contains three dialogues, also one male to female, one male to male and one female to female. The only time a female voice initiates the dialogue is when speaking to another female and the characters are exclusively female.

Occupational Roles
Mentions of occupational roles in the text and illustrations are:
Male: sumo wrestler, footballer, waiter, bank employee, student, DJ, football referee, athlete
Female: gymnast, DJ, children’s TV presenter, shop assistant, teacher, student

Activities, but not occupations:
Male: surfing, samba dancing, Russian baths, football, eating out, surfing the internet, shopping, basketball
Female: samba dancing, eating out, shopping, playing the guitar

For the most part, the males and females portrayed are fixed in stereotypical roles; the males enjoying more masculine sports and activities such as surfing, basketball, football, sumo wrestling and the internet, and the women with more feminine pursuits, such as shopping, playing musical instruments and gymnastics. A couple of notable exceptions are the image portraying a man window shopping for shoes and the choice of Zoë Ball, DJ, a typically male profession, in the fact file section, although one of the photographs is of Zoë Ball and her also famous DJ husband, perhaps emphasising her role as wife rather than an individually accomplished woman.

In a unit talking about leisure time and lifestyle, in all the text and images the only sport associated with a female is gymnastics. Conversely, masculine figures are associated with six different sports, reinforcing the stereotype that sport is masculine domain.

In conclusion, looking at the three aspects of omission, firstness and occupational roles in unit 1 of Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate, it can be seen that male words and images appear more often in the book than female, masculine forms of words and masculine voices appear first and that with few exceptions, occupational gender roles are reinforced. This is only a very small sample and analysis of the book which is itself a book from a larger series. However, if the same pattern follows throughout the book and the Cutting Edge series, it seems to suggest that there have been very advances in sexism in EFL course books since Porreca’s 1984 study and there is still much work to be done to redress the balance.

References
Cunningham, S. and Moor, P. 2001. Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate Harlow: Pearson Education

Porreca, K. 1984. ‘Sexism in current ESL coursebooks’ TESOL Quarterly 18 (4): 705-724

Sunderland, J. 1992. ‘Gender in the EFL classroom.’ ELT Jourmal 46 (1): 81-91