Looking at gender representation in language teaching materials may be revealing of multiple gender-representational asymmetries but says nothing about how texts will be understood by students, nor used by teachers. I advocate more empirical studies of what teachers actually do in class with texts in which gender is clearly relevant.
Studies of gender representation in foreign language learning materials (usually textbooks) date back to the 1970s (Schmitz, 1975; Ittzes 1978; Hartman and Judd, 1978) and have continued into the current decade (e.g. Lee and Collins, 2015; BaÄŸ and Bayyurt, 2015). While these are often revealing of gender bias in terms of more male than female characters, and of male characters in a wider range of social and professional roles than female characters, we have to ask: what are the implications of this? Of course, if the relevant textbooks are left in a cupboard, there are no implications at all, suggesting that what we need to look at is textbook consumption (how textbook texts are understood, how they are used) by students and teachers. Some writers make bold inferential claims here: about how the gender bias will influence students’ thinking (but we don’t know) or how teachers will use the books (the assumption is often: uncritically). It is perfectly possible that students will read gender-biased texts critically, and that teachers will encourage social critique of the texts their students are exposed to, for example, as useful oral discussion. In this talk, I examine the few studies which have looked empirically at what teachers do with what I call ‘gender critical points’ in language textbook texts, focussing on both methodological and analytical issues.
