GENDER REFLECTIONS IN THE ENGLISH COURSEBOOKS OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOLS: THE CASE OF IRAN

The aim of present study is to investigate gender reflections in English course books of the Junior high school level in Iran. A systematic content analysis was carried out with regard to (a) gender representations in both texts and illustrations and (b) men/women theme arrangement in dialogs and reading passages and (c) presentation of gender with regard to jobs. In order to analyze the content of the course books and gathering the required data, content analysis and library and documentary techniques were used respectively. In addition, in order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics (frequency, percent) and inferential statistics (Chi-Square test) were used. The results of this study shows that there is a significant difference between the number of pictures, names, pronouns, and jobs used by men and women (P