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Abstract

Female educational attainment in Iran has been increasing since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran. This study investigated whether this female superiority is reflected or supported in Iranian textbooks. The study investigated how gender roles are represented in Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and AFL (Arabic as a Foreign Language) textbooks. “Criteria for Analysis of the Equality of Gender Representation” by Rifkin, was used for content analysis. These criteria are grouped into two main categories of ‘pictorial’ and ‘verbal’. The results showed that with no exception and in all criteria, males were represented significantly more than females. This indicates that males were the central point of most sentences, either as the subject of actions, or as the main figure in sentences and pictures. Significant differences were observed between AFL and EFL textbooks.

Author Biography

Mitra Baghdadi is a psycholinguist, with M.A. degree in Linguistics from California State University Long Beach. In the past twenty years she has been involved in many research studies and her work has been presented at the Linguistics Colloquium at California State University Long Beach and Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Her interests and specialties are language documentation, gender studies, qualitative research and bilingualism.

Ali Rezaei is a professor at California State University, Long Beach. During the last 20 years he has been teaching and doing research at City University of New York, and the University of Calgary, Canada. Computer applications in education, research methods, statistics and assessment (evaluation) are among the courses that he teaches. His research interests are assessment, the Internet, and social networks.

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