Perpetuation of gender bias in New Headway: a multimodal critical discourse analysis with a diachronic lens

ABSTRACT

Framed by MCDA, our study examines diachronic changes in gender representation in five New Headway Elementary (NHE) editions. Our findings demonstrate that NHE’s gender representation is established on heteronormative binaries indicating bias against women in recreational, domestic, professional, and educational spaces despite few important attempts by the coursebook writers to address gender bias. Gender representation in recreational spaces is built on stereotypical discourses. At home, women mostly have nurturing roles while men are depicted as relaxing or playing with their children. At work, men’s professional representation focuses solely on their professional career, whereas women are represented with reference to their domestic and caregiving roles. At school, men are presented as teaching and learning various subjects and sports, while women are mostly associated with teaching and learning languages and art only. In closing, we offer teachers three activities to develop learners’ critical awareness against gender discrimination while using NHE.

KEYWORDS:

• Diachronic analysis
• gender representation
• New Headway
• multimodal critical discourse analysis
• ELT coursebooks
• LGBTQ+ representation
• coursebook analysis

Coursebooks analysed

Soars, L., and J. Soars. 1993. Headway elementary. Oxford: OUP.

Soars, L., and J. Soars. 2000. New headway elementary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP.

Soars, L., and J. Soars. 2006. New headway elementary. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP.

Soars, L., and J. Soars. 2011. New headway elementary. 4th ed. Oxford: OUP.

Soars, L., J. Soars, and P. Hancock. 2019. Headway elementary. 5th ed. Oxford: OUP.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Cis- is the Latin prefix for ‘on the same side of.’ Accordingly, cisgender individuals have a current gender identity that is the same label as their birth-assigned category of sex