27.2949, Review: Discourse; Socioling: Mills, Mustapha (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2949. Wed Jul 13 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2949, Review: Discourse; Socioling: Mills, Mustapha (2015)

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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 10:55:11
From: Adriana Picoral [adrianaps at email.arizona.edu]
Subject: Gender Representation in Learning Materials

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36140137


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3994.html

EDITOR: Abolaji S. Mustapha
EDITOR: Sara  Mills
TITLE: Gender Representation in Learning Materials
SUBTITLE: International Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Adriana Picoral, University of Arizona

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Gender Representation in Learning Materials, edited by Sara Mills and Abolaji
S. Mustapha, aims at inspiring teachers to help students think critically
about gender representations. The editors also emphasize that the book
explores these representation issues from an international perspective,
including studies held in different countries around the world. The book is
divided into three parts. Part One explores theoretical aspects of textbook
analysis pertaining to gender representation. Part Two contains 4 chapters on
textual analysis of textbooks. The third and last part presents essays that
explore how teachers and learners interact with gender representations found
in textbooks. 

Part One, “Theories of Representation in Relation to Textbooks,” includes a
chapter by the editors and a chapter by Jane Sunderland, who has written
extensively on gender issues in language, literacy and language education
(such as Sunderland 2004 and 2012). In the first chapter, Mustapha and Mills
provide an overview of the research by discussing findings from the literature
spanning from the 1970s to today. Three chronological phases of research in
the field are explored: a first phase where scholars brought awareness to the
issue of gender imbalance in learning materials, a second phase where
follow-up studies assessed changes, and a third and more recent phase that
goes beyond the content of textbooks and analyze how teachers and students
deal with the materials. All three phases are discussed in an international
context, with the authors expanding on what parts of the world each phase has
been more successful in. The authors end this chapter with suggestions for
further research, arguing for the need for studies that look into teacher
training and the involvement of other stakeholders such as parents and
government officials. In the second essay, Jane Sunderland discusses different
aspects of textbook analysis, from the question of which genre should the
analyst focus on to different ways to analyze the text, including approaches
to deal with multimodality. She also argues for analyses of both how teachers
and students use classroom materials and how representation decisions are made
during textbook production. 

Part Two, “Textual Analysis,” contains 4 studies that address gender
representation issues found in textbook content. In the first chapter, “Gender
representation in Hong Kong Primary English-Language Textbooks: A corpus
study,” Jackie Lee and Peter Collins analyze two editions of the same textbook
published 17 years apart. They confirm the findings of the literature – there
have been improvements in gender representation, with more women being
represented, but more progress is still needed. This is also Christine Ott’s
conclusion in her chapter, titled “Innocent Maths? Gender Representations in
German Maths Books.” Her analysis of gender representation in 12 math
textbooks in German included not only a three-level linguistic analysis of the
content (i.e., lexical, preposition, and textual levels) but also guided
interviews with school authorities, authors and editors. Ott explores a
variety of issues in gender representation, including jobs and gender, family
relationships and heteronormativity.  

Also in Part Two, Ebru Bağ and Yasemin Bayyurt adopt both quantitative and
qualitative approaches in their chapter, “Gender Representations in EFL
Textbooks in Turkey.” The authors’ study focuses on gender equality and equity
issues in EFL textbooks used in grades 4 to 8 in Turkish schools. They center
their analysis on textbook content, by counting pronouns, proper names, the
number of males and females both in illustrations and as main characters in
some of the readings. Qualitatively, they looked at what jobs men and women
are described to hold, what family relationships were present, who is
responsible for household chores, what kind of toys boys and girls play with
in both the illustrations and the reading passages, among others.  Once again,
the authors’ findings suggest that although there has been widening of
possible roles female characters assume, there is still a lot of room for
improvement in representation. For example, their findings indicate that men
are not represented in roles traditionally occupied by women. 

The last chapter in Part Two, “Gender Stereotyping and Linguistic Sexism in
Qatari Teaching Materials,” expands on recent research on gender
representation in school textbooks used in Qatar. In their study, Eslami et
al. conducted interviews with teachers and students to collect information on
awareness and perception of gender representation issues in classroom
materials. Their findings indicate that both teachers and students in Qatar
hold very traditional views of male and female roles. The authors also
conclude that it is necessary to go beyond textbook content and include issues
related to society, religion and culture in gender representation analyses. 

Part Three, “Beyond the Text,” contains 5 chapters, each presenting a
different research perspective that focuses on how teachers and students
construct and deal with gender representations. In the first chapter in this
part, “Textual Representation and Transformations in Teacher Masculinity,”
Roslyn Appleby discusses her findings from interviews with 7 male native
speakers of English who were teaching or had taught EFL in conversation
schools in Japan. Following a discourse analysis approach, she examined how
these teachers built their masculine pedagogical self. Appleby explores each
teacher’s perceptions of being a western man in Japan and being a teacher, and
how these two parts of their identity interact with each other. The author
concludes that gender and sexuality do impact language teaching, and thus
should be the focus of future research. 

In the second chapter, “Finnish teachers Exploring Gender Bias in School
Textbooks,” Liisa Tainio and Ulla Karvonen discuss their two-part study in
detail. First, using a critical discourse analysis approach, they explored
gender representation in 59 textbooks used in basic education in Finland
(grades 3, 6 and 9). The authors analyzed every textbook used in three subject
matters: mother tongue, mathematics and vocational education. In the second
part of their study, using a conversation analysis approach, Tainio and
Karvonen analyzed the conversations of two pairs of teachers discussing how
gender is represented in the same materials investigated by the authors in the
first part of their study. As in other studies, the analysis of the textbooks
shows that some representation problems still persist, especially
heteronormativity. As for the conversation analysis, the authors conclude that
the teachers showed a tendency to discuss boys and girls in terms of binary
opposition. 

Using an adapted version of CDA, Abolaji S. Mustapha goes beyond the written
words and focuses on visual representations in his chapter, “Gender
Positioning through Visual Images in English-Language Textbooks in Nigeria.”
The author analyzed how women and men are positioned in the pictures found in
nine English-language textbooks used in Nigeria. Mustapha confirms the
findings of other studies by concluding that the materials he analyzed show
men as having more status and being more active than women. 

Ekaterina Moore, in “Gender Socialisation through Literary Texts: A Study of
Two Folk Tales Used in a Russian Preschool,” examined gender representation in
two folk tales commonly taught to Russian preschoolers. She also analyzed how
a teacher presented these two tales to her 4-year-old students, who were to
reenact each story guided by their teacher. For the textual analysis, the
author counted the number of characters, the amount of talk done by each
character, the roles assigned to them, and what order they appear in the
story. For the analysis of the teacher’s speech, the author compared the
teacher’s version of the story with the original version regarding both role
assignment and amount of talk each student performed. Moore also analyzed the
teacher’s use of diminutives and her pitch when reading off each character’s
voice. The author concludes that although the male characters talk more in the
text in the original versions, the teacher’s modified version of the stories
allowed all students equal speaking opportunities. Moore also argues that the
representation of the characters in the books and the way the teacher alters
her pitch for each character in the stories provides the students with a wide
range of gendered behaviors. 

Following a feminist Critical Discourse Analysis approach, Joanna Pawelczyk
and Łukasz Pakuła’s chapter, “Constructing Gender and Sexuality in the EFL
Classroom in Poland: Textbook Construction and Classroom Negotiation?”
provides an analysis of gender representation in EFL textbooks commonly used
in primary schools in Poland. Since the authors looked at both the text and
the images in conjunction, they call their approach multimodal.  Pawelczyk and
Pakuła also focused on the instructions in the teacher’s book, and how these
compared with what the teachers actually did in the classroom. Although the
authors do not specify how many lessons were recorded and observed, they
included in their chapter some analysis of how the observed teachers dealt
with gender in class. In the textbook content analysis, their findings
reiterate what others have found – some representations are progressive,
others are more traditional, but heteronormative is still strongly present.
>From their classroom observations, Pawelczyk and Pakuła conclude that the
teachers presented the materials as gendered even when the textbook did not do
so, with some activities being assigned to boys and others to girls. For
example, when practicing conditionals, the teacher determined that only girls
should complete the “If I were a flower, I’d…” sentence, while only boys were
to complete the “If I were a car, I’d…” sentence. 

EVALUATION

“Gender Representation in Learning Materials” presents a broad perspective on
the field, and it is a useful resource to anyone interested in the topic. The
book as a whole offers a good overview of how to approach this type of
analysis, from quantitative to qualitative methods. It also offers a good
variety of contexts, from countries like Qatar, Finland, Turkey and Russia. 

The introductory chapter by Jane Sunderland is especially useful for analysts.
She raises important issues regarding different types of analysis, from
linguistic to multimodal. She also offers a number of germane suggestions on
how to conduct analyses and what to analyze . I would recommend this chapter
to any scholar who does textbook analysis.

Embodying Sunderland’s suggestions, Mustapha’s chapter presents a good
starting point on how to analyze images in textbooks. He also offers strong
arguments for this kind of visual analysis.  Also illustrating some of
Sunderland’s suggestions, Christine Ott presents a broader analysis of
learning materials, going beyond language content and including perceptions of
experts involved in textbook review and approval in different states in
Germany. Although Ott claims that her discourse analysis model is composed of
three levels, her essay explores only two of these three: the actor-oriented
(i.e., interviews with people involved in textbook production, review and
approval) and intratextual levels (i.e., analysis of the linguistic context of
the textbook), leaving the transtextual (i.e., sociohistorical contexts that
link discursively the textbooks being analyzed with other previously analyzed
textbooks) mostly unexplored. However, her contextualization of the education
system in Germany is comprehensive and pertinent to the topic. The author also
approaches issues that are not explored in other studies, such as the use of
dichotomous gender language, which makes a clear distinction between male and
female roles or characters, versus the use of hybrid language forms, which
makes it harder for the textbook user to assign a binary gender to characters
or people in the text. 

In general, each chapter is coherent and cohesive within itself, also fitting
well with the book as a whole.  Moore’s and Appleby’s chapters are good
examples of how well-organized chapters should look, with clearly titled
subsections that present each part of their studies, from methods to findings.
 Appleby connects concepts with excerpts from her interviews in a clear and
concise manner. Moore’s research approach is also comprehensive. Her pitch
analysis technique is innovative, differing from the other research methods
used in the book.

Tainio and Karvonen’s chapter is also well organized, and each part of their
study and findings are clearly explained. The chapter raises interesting
issues regarding teachers’ perceptions of social gender and biological sex. It
also touches on immigration issues in schools in Finland. Their findings show
that even in an educational system that is praised worldwide, teachers could
benefit from gender awareness training.

Eslami et al. also offer a different perspective from the other essays in the
book, especially because the studies discussed in their chapter were conducted
in a country whose official religion is Islam. The authors successfully
discuss the complexities involved in seeking equal representation in school
materials when the very concepts of gender equality and equity conflict with
what children learn at home.

On the other hand, Lee and Collins’s study replicates corpus analyses used in
other studies, following a previously explored and quantitative approach. In
addition, they do not address issues of sexuality, skipping altogether any
discussion on heteronormativity. Both textbook editions the authors analyzed
are relatively old (one published in 1988 and the other in 2005), which does
serve the authors’ purpose since they were interested in how gender
representation evolved in these materials after political and educational
changes in Hong Kong. It is important to keep in mind that not all students
and teachers have access to modern books. Some textbooks still in use today
around the world, including ESL classrooms in the US, have been published a
long time ago. That is certainly another reason why it is extremely important
for teachers to be aware of these representation issues.

However, not all chapters are clear and well-organized. Bağ and Bayyurt
present a lot of relevant data, but in a confusing way. The pie charts that
present the quantitative data are very difficult to read, rendering them
useless. In addition, the authors did not make use of tables to organize their
findings on gender and jobs. Bağ and Bayyurt do bring up a number of pertinent
issues such as teacher training, but the chapter is a little repetitive and
confusing. On the other hand, they offer a comprehensive contextualization of
how the issue of gender representation in textbooks has been dealt with
throughout the years by scholars and the government in Turkey. 

All in all, this book fills a gap in the literature and achieves the goal of
bringing together a broad set of approaches to a topic that has intrigued
scholars for decades. I am not sure every chapter would appeal to and inspire
classroom teachers as the editors intended, since many of the studies are
highly technical. However, whether the reader is interested in just one of the
approaches used in discourse analysis regarding gender representation in
learning materials or whether she is looking for an expansive perspective of
the field, this volume offers it all. 

REFERENCES

Sunderland, J. (2012). Teaching gender and language. In Teaching Gender (pp.
102-121). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Sunderland, J. (2004). Gendered discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Adriana Picoral is a PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition and
Teaching program at University of Arizona. She holds a BSc in Computer
Science, and an MA degree in TESOL from The New School. Her research interests
include the study of human cognitive, language, literacy and learning
processes in both formal and informal instructional contexts. She also has an
interest in human language processing, discourse analysis and teacher
education. Her ultimate goal is to design instructional procedures that
enhance additional language learning.





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