Gender Representation in an Indonesia EFL Textbook or Vocational High School: A Corpus Assisted Content Analysis

Abstract

This study aims to investigate and analyse gender representation in English Textbook a foreign language. The source of data is from an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks, Forward an English, for vocational high school students in grade X in Indonesia 2020. Content analysis was implemented as the design, and corpus linguistic tools were utilized

to investigate the ratio of female-to-male appearance, the use of gender-neutral and gender- marked, the adjectives associated with women and men, the title of address for reference to

women, and the order of mention of women and men. The findings showed an attempt of the author to represent gender equality, including the equality of the appearance of both women and men, the strategy to neutralize gender-marked to be gender-neutral, and using the title address “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.” or “Miss” for the liberation of women. However, there are still some imbalanced representations of gender that are attached to gender-marked nouns, and the male-firstness is still dominant with a ratio of 1:3. Furthermore, there is an emergent finding in terms of occupation. It is shown that men tend to be portrayed as having settled, established, highly paid, and prestigious jobs compared to women. In conclusion, gender has been represented equally in this EFL textbook, even though there are still some imbalanced representations of gender.