A Critical Image Analysis of Gender Positioning in Iraqi EFL Textbook

Abstract

Textbooks of any country are considered an important tool for the purpose of position in stereotypes of gender at the schools of that country. Therefore, these textbooks must picture the society equally in terms of males and females in order to reflect a real image of that society. The aim of the current paper is to investigate gender positioning in the Iraqi EFL textbooks (English for Iraq) for sixth preparatory stage. For the purpose of analyzing the data, the study adopts Giaschi’s (2000)approach. The main goal of this adopted approach is to analyze the data critically. The study concluded that females and males are positioned in a biased way in the selected data. It means that men play the major roles and they are active in the images but women on the other and are passive and have a minor role  in the examined images.