Gender Representation in The English Textbook for Indonesian Junior High School Students: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports the analysis of ELT textbook for the eighth graders of Junior High School. We examined the extent of gender representation from the visual and textual materials in the textbook, in terms of the involvement of male and female gender in stereotypical and non-stereotypical areas. For that, Critical Discourse Analysis was used as the research design in this study, and Fairclough’s 1995 Three-Dimensional Model that consists of three stages of analysis (Description, Interpretation, Explanation) was applied as the data analysis method. The result shows that the representation of female visually and textually has already shown a good sign of gender representation for females were pictured in stereotypical and non-stereotypical areas. Meanwhile, for males, their representation is good textually, but visually they are still underrepresented, as males were only pictured in stereotypical area. However, when compared to the findings of previous studies, we found that the extent of gender stereotyping has reduced to some extent.