Abstract

In an era of rapid and sustainable alterations, Saudi Arabia are now going through transformation in gender roles and opportunities. The current study aimed to investigate the gender roles in the two major English language textbooks widely used by Saudi female high school students, namely Traveller 1 and Traveller 2, which has been taught since 2013. To achieve the study goals, a mixed method was used; Content Analysis and a compiling quantitative data in which the corpus of the two English textbooks were analyzed and frequencies and percentages of gender appearances and activities were also calculated. The major findings of the study are 1) the textbooks contained some obvious gender bias and imbalance; 2) males were predominant whereas females were completely absent or marginalized; 3) females’ pictures and participations in dialogues were very limited; 4) dialogues were largely male-male predominant and were about various topics; 5) males signed to gender roles significantly higher and more aggressive; 6) in contrast, females had weaker roles and never shown as symbolic or even significant social figures.

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