MARTÍNEZ RAMACCIOTTI JAVIER NICOLÁS
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Changes in the Representation of Women in EFL Text-books from the Late 1960's, 1980's and 1990's
Autor/es:
ALINA VERÓNICA MACHNICKI; JAVIER N. MARTÍNEZ R.
Lugar:
Córdoba
Reunión:
Conferencia; FAAPI 2002 Annual Conference. Curriculum Development; 2002
Resumen:
The Ministry of Education and the publishing houses limit teachers? and school co-ordinators? selection of content. What these practitioners can do is make a sound choice of text-books based on an awareness of the representations of reality each of them offer. We have chosen to examine text-book series because text-books are compulsorily consumed by many people, they are consumed uncritically from a young age, and they express the discourse of authorities, namely teachers and educational institutions. Our study brings to light the representation of reality, of social groups and individuals that three text-book series offer as the official, authoritative and legitimate version of the world. We have analysed the representation of women and argue that this is relevant to curriculum design because it can help us make an informed choice of text-books. The hypothesis of the study is that in order to reflect the ongoing changes in women?s social roles, the image of women that the English 901 (1968), New Generation (1986-88) and Reward (1994-97) series offer has accordingly changed. This study combines features of qualitative and diachronic research with a quantitative and comparative analysis of the data. Our findings show that there is a general change from sexist representations of women in the older books to more egalitarian ones in the newest series in terms of content and language form, though there still remain some linguistic features with sexist overtones in the latter series. Our main suggestion is that gender-biased text-books should be challenged though not eliminated, but used as instruments to raise socio-linguistic awareness.