ABSTRACT

Instructional materials are one of the areas in which gender inequality is very easily institutionalised. The study investigated gender representation in high school English textbooks in Afghanistan. High school English textbooks were used as the corpus of the study. A mixed content analysis approach was used to analyse the data. The frequency of items for each category was counted and tabulated. The findings showed that women were substantially underrepresented whereas men were significantly overrepresented in text and illustrations. Male characters were placed before female characters in all coordinated phrases, and none of the dialogues was initiated by female characters. Women were portrayed in a limited number of social roles while men occupied a wide range of them. Moreover, masculine generic forms were widely used to refer to both women and men. Thus, it is concluded that high school English textbooks promote and perpetuate gender inequality in Afghanistan.

摘要

教学材料是性别不平等很容易制度化的领域之一。该研究调查了阿富汗高中英语课本中的性别代表性。高中英语课本被用作研究的语料库。使用混合内容分析方法来分析数据。计算每个类别的项目频率并制成表格。调查结果表明，女性在文字和插图中的比例明显偏低，而男性的比例明显偏高。在所有协调短语中，男性角色都位于女性角色之前，并且没有对话是由女性角色发起的。女性被描绘成有限的社会角色，而男性则扮演了广泛的角色。而且，阳性通用形式被广泛用于指代女性和男性。因此，可以得出结论，高中英语教科书助长并延续了阿富汗的性别不平等。