Textbook research is a broad field that can combine different sub-fields depending on the topic of research. This paper analyses the representation of feminine and masculine gender in a selected set of textbooks for teaching English in Japanese junior high schools, New Horizon (1, 2, and 3). The textbooks used are from 2021.
The visual and verbal aspects of the textbooks in the collection were analyzed in order to discover whether the representation of the male and female gender is balanced or imbalanced. The analysis contains qualitative and quantitative parts. The main part of the analysis is a descriptive statistical analysis, which presents the results numerically and in percentages, and also contains an inferential statistical analysis, where (where possible) a chi-square test is used to check whether the differences in the results obtained are statistically significant. The task seeks to answer the questions of whether the frequency of appearance of characters in the visual and verbal parts is balanced, whether there is a balance in the representation of the occupations of male or female characters, and whether the preference for firstness in dialogues and noun pairs is at least similar. After the analysis, it was concluded, that the 2021 series New Horizon to some extent contained a male-based bias.
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