Browsing by Author "Gröhn, Heljä"

The subject of this study is gender-awareness in two, 9th grade English as a foreign language, (EFL), textbooks in Finnish secondary schools: SanomaPro publisher’s On the Go 3 and Otava publisher’s Scene 3. As 9th graders face the decision of what study track to take after secondary school, the gender representations in school textbooks can have a significant effect on how they perceive their possibilities in higher education and working life. Also, the Finnish National Agency for Education and the National Core Curriculum both call for a gender-aware approach to teaching, and this study aimed to find out if the goal of gender-aware teaching is supported by the textbooks in use. The main analytical framework used in this study was critical discourse analysis (CDA) and particularly Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of CDA. The aim was to find out how and in what roles different genders are portrayed in the books and if any other genders than female and male were represented. In addition to the qualitative method of CDA, a quantitative method of counting the instances of different genders in both the texts and the visuals in the books was employed. The study material consisted of two 9th grade EFL books and the core study texts and supplementary optional texts of both books. The main findings of the study were that male characters appeared in the texts and visuals considerably more often than females and neither of the books mentioned other genders than female and male. In both books, males were portrayed in more socially significant roles, such as politicians, historical figures, and sports heroes when females were most often referred to with kinship terms and less socially significant professions. The conclusions of this study were that these textbooks do not seem to support the goal of gender-aware teaching in secondary schools, as the representation of males significantly outweighs the representation of females, both in numbers and their social significance, potential and contribution to society. The contents of both books seem to reinforce traditional gender roles and portray female’s opportunities and roles in society in a much narrower sense and assigns decision making roles and roles with societal power to males. In addition, there is no mention or acknowledgement of the diversity of gender in either of these books. Although some attempt was made to consider the visibility of females, this can’t be deemed sufficient to ensure equal representation of genders. When creating future textbooks, authors should pay more attention to the equal representation of genders and the inclusion of other gender representations than female and male. Also, more rigorous analytics should be employed when planning the content of the textbooks to ensure equal representation of different genders.