Deconstruction of Cultural, Racial and Gender Dominance in Iranian Senior High School EFL Textbooks

Abstract

Course books play a crucial role in educational process and are believed to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching. Every new textbook needs to be analyzed in order to reach its best. Hence this study aims to analyze three Iranian English course books to reveal how various cultures are shown via the course books characters' race, nationality, gender, and intercultural communications. The inspection of the course books revealed unequal cultural representations with the dominance of white and male characters. Furthermore, regarding the intercultural interactions, most examples included conversations among Iranians in a superficial level of cultural engagement. It was also found that males' roles are more highlighted throughout the series. Hence, in some cases, the leading ideology floating in this series is prototyping the Iranian-Islamic culture and values by means of English. Overall, this series seemed to suffer from biased embedded ideologies in terms of presenting cultures, races and genders. The findings of this study are of great help for language teachers, language learners, textbook developers, and curriculum developers to adopt an international position toward education.