Textbook Evaluation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Talk Time Series

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate how English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks portray males and females according to their social roles and subject positions. To this end, Talk Time, which is one of English language textbook series currently used in many English language institutes in Iran, was selected to examine to what extent equality exists between genders in this textbook. In fact, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms of nine major aspects of gender: female and male’s characters, pictorial representations, titles, activities, and  firstness in mixed gender dialogues, gender focus of textbook themes or content, as well as gender relations. Additionally, in order to extract the ideology behind these textbooks, Fairclough’s (2001) three dimensional model was utilized. The results indicated that the series equally displays both males and females. The result also revealed that there was no sexism in the textbooks and friend-friend relations were mostly presented which is the norm of the society. Actually, in this study, a more comprehensive description of textbook evaluation with ideological basis was presented. The findings of this study can assist teachers to pay more attention to the evaluation of textbook and consequently select an appropriate book according to the learners’ expectations, needs, and interests.