Abstract

In spite of the crucial importance of textbooks, their increasing development day by day, and their significant effects on saving time, energy, and budgets, only few studies have been done on textbooks evaluation from a critical discourse analysis perspective. This study aimed to analyze and compare the gender representation in Top Notch and Summit series in order to find out if the gender representation is equally balanced in these two textbooks. The study, thus, analyzed the series in terms of nine major aspects of gender: female and male’s characters, female and male’s pictorial representations, female and male’s titles, activities, and firstness of female and male in the mixed gender dialogues. To that end, Fairclough’s (1989, 2001) models were adopted in order to detect the ideology behind these textbooks. The findings of study indicated that, in most cases, gender representation is more balanced in Top Notch series than in Summit series. The results of this comparative research would also help us gain a better understanding of textbooks currently used in Iranian language institutes.

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