Culture And Gender Representation In Visual And Verbal Texts In National Endorsed ELT Textbooks

dra. eni burhayani, m.pd; herri mulyono, ph.d.; hamzah puadi ilyas, ph.d.;

Culture and gender are two among other prominent aspects in foreign language learning, particularly in English language teaching. The existence of this relationship also has greatly influenced of education in Indonesia as multicultural. This study explores the culture and gender representation through visual and verbal text in ELT textbooks used for secondary school students. This study adopts the frameworks proposed by Xiao (2010) to analysed culture “small-c” representation. The findings revealed the highest number of visual illustration is mostly presented to life style aspect (34), followed by customs (12), values (11), holiday (6), hobbies (3) and food aspect (1). However, for the representation of culture in verbal text, the representantion of culture “small-c” were indicate customs and life style themes (47 and 41 respectively). In short, customs aspect as culture “small-c” were the most frequent in customs aspects better than life style aspects in verbal texts. In addition, to analyzed and examine the gender representation in textbooks, this study adopted Brugeilles & Cromer (2018) study to recorded the gender character according to their role potrayed in the textbooks. Gender appearences potrayed male and female are treat almost equaly (54 and 53 respectively). In contrast, for the verbal text there were more female words mentioned than male mentioned. Generally, there was gender imbalance in the portrayal of gender images of males and females character. This study suggest that schools textbooks need to put the cultural load into the balance portion such as the portion of source culture, target culture and international target culture and pay more attention to equal treatment of
the two genders and gender awareness among students may be enhance.