The Ideological Import of a Second Identity: A Critical Image Analysis to Global EFL Materials

摘要

The critical analysis of images or visual texts, as an emerging and adapted version of critical discourse analysis (CDA), can contribute to distinguish bias or fair gender manifestation. The rationale behind this study is that little systematic and exhaustive studies have been conducted with an eye towards investigating images solely in EFL textbooks. To offset this imbalance, this paper adopted Fairclough’s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social semiotic analysis (SSA) framework by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to interrogate the extent and types of gender bias in the Four Corners series, the commercially-produced English language textbooks (Richards and Bohlke, 2012). By adopting a quantitative and qualitative design, image typologies were tallied, girded and tabulated to see how the probable and hidden portrayal image patterns had been rendered for both genders. The results revealed over-representation persists in all the textbook series in certain degrees for both genders and while a textbook series might over-represent one gender it does not necessarily imply that the individual textbook over-represents the same gender.