Uncovering Gender Representation in Farsi Biyamuzim(Let’s Learn Persian) Series

Language teaching textbooks are a mirror of a nation's culture and customs and can reflect the attitudes and values of a society. Therefore, considering that each element in educational books has a meaning that is decoded by the readers, the present study intended to examine the texts and pictures in "Let's Learn Persian" textbook series in terms of the way gender is represented. To this end, among 30 lessons in each volume, three lessons from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the book were selected for analysis and their texts and pictures were coded based on the study's criteria. Findings indicated that in all considered criteria except for one in the first volume, where female characters outnumbered male ones, gender bias in favor of men was observed. Results of the chi-square test indicated a statistically significant difference with respect to all the criteria, except for the order of males and females' mention in a phrase, among different volumes of this series. Additionally, analysis of pictures suggested gender bias in favor of men in terms of the number of female and male characters in the pictures. In general, more women were depicted in the first volume in that most of the characters of the lessons examined in this volume were children and women and the topics revolved around introducing people and everyday events; however, the intermediate and advanced volumes, in which the topics shifted to social and literary ones, showed the underrepresentation of female characters in texts and pictures.
Extended Abstract:
Language teaching textbooks, including those teaching Persian to speakers of other languages (TPSOL), are a mirror of a nation's culture and customs and can reflect the attitudes and values of a society. Therefore, bearing in mind that each element in educational books has a meaning that is decoded by the readers, the present study intended to examine the texts and pictures in the "Let's Learn Persian" textbook series in terms of the way gender is represented. This specific series was chosen because of its popularity as well as its frequency of use in different parts of the world where Persian is taught to non-Persian speakers.
The first book of this series (the beginning level) was developed by Zolfaghari et al. in 1382. The series includes five volumes ranging from beginning to advanced levels. An attempt has been made to focus on the four language skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing as well as grammar structures. The last two volumes, i.e., four and five, mostly deal with Persian literature, culture, and literary works.
To uncover gender representation, the researchers analyzed the texts and pictures of this series based on the frameworks introduced by Lee (2014) and Porreca (1984). These two frameworks were first merged and adapted to the context of teaching Persian. It is worth mentioning that the two frameworks overlap in all criteria except for one, that is, the adjectives attributed to different genders which is considered by Perreca but not Lee. Meanwhile, they were adapted because two criteria could not be applied to Persian. First, in English, the two pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ are used to refer to male and female characters, respectively. In Persian, on the other hand, one single pronoun is used for both genders. Therefore, this criterion was excluded from the framework. Also, masculine generic constructions were not considered in this study either because of the same reason.
Considering the above-mentioned points, the criteria taken into account in this study included the number and frequency of female and male characters, the order of mentioning of these characters, adjectives attributed to each gender, familial roles and also social/occupational roles of each gender. Based on one of the criteria of Lee's framework, i.e., visual representation, the number of male and female characters was also calculated in each picture; that is, the number of men more than women, number of women more than men, an equal number of men and women, men only, or women only. Frequencies and percentages of different categories were calculated and tabulated for each lesson and each volume separately. Furthermore, gender representation was compared among different volumes using Chi-square.
To analyze the way gender is represented, in this study, a sample of each volume was selected in the following way. From each volume, a lesson from the beginning, one from the middle, and another one from the end of the book were selected. More specifically, in volumes 1 to 4, the 1st,15th and 29th lessons were chosen for the analysis because the 30th lesson is a review of the previous lessons. In Volume 5, on the other hand, the 2nd,15th and 29th lessons were selected for content analysis because the first lesson consists of two prayers which were not suitable for analyzing gender representation. Then, the representation of gender was investigated by coding the data based on the aforementioned framework. Moreover, to ensure the reliability of the coding procedure, inter-and intra-coder reliabilities were also estimated. The inter-coder reliability index was 94% while the intra-coder agreement was 98%, which was high enough and suited the purposes of this study.
Findings indicated that in all considered criteria except for one in the first volume, where female characters outnumbered male ones, gender bias in favor of men was observed. Further, results of the chi-square test indicated a statistically significant difference with respect to all the criteria, except for the order of males and females' mention in a phrase, among different volumes of this series. Additionally, analysis of pictures suggested gender bias in favor of men in terms of the number of female and male characters. In general, the presence of more women in the beginning-level volume compared to the intermediate and advanced ones was salient. More specifically, most of the characters of the first volume were children and women and the topics revolved around introducing people and everyday events. However, the intermediate and advanced volumes, in which the topics shifted to social and literary ones, showed the underrepresentation of female characters in texts and pictures. It is noteworthy that women were mostly marginalized in the last two volumes which mainly focus on Persian literature. Implications of these findings for curriculum and syllabus designers as well as materials developers and Persian language teachers are discussed.