Gender Representation in An Indonesia EFL Textbook for Vocational High School: A Corpus-Assisted Contents Analysis

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate gender representation in English Textbooks as a foreign language, Forward an English for Vocational High School students in grade X in Indonesia. This study is an investigation of an English Textbook published in 2020 with corpus linguistic tools utilized to investigate the ratio of appearance of both women to men, the use of pattern gendermarked and gender-neutral, 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 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.