Women and Language Representation of Gender Identity in Farsi, Arabic, and English Textbooks of the Iranian Schools

Using a social approach, this paper investigates the association between language and gender. Language has been identified as a media tool to maintain the gender tatus of individuals in our societies (Turner-Bowker 1996). Patterns associated with the gender identity of individuals are substantially formed during childhood and adolescence. This is mainly related to the fact that schools and textbooks play a key role in the gender socialization process of children. Using the content analysis technique, this paper examines how gender identity patterns have been represented in the Iranian school textbooks in three different languages: Farsi, Arabic and English. Generally speaking, the results show that "the male-first phenomenon" (Lee and Collins 2008) are clearly observed in the textbooks. Although these gender patterns vary partly across the textbooks, the similar patterns of gender codes (Taylor 2003) are represented in all of these three different languages textbooks. This evidently echoes the more important role of the socio-cultural context. The results also show that the representation of gender patterns in these textbooks is significantly correlated to various stages of language teaching.