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Long-ingrained views of EFL teaching foreground grammar and language skills as the main goal of learning, backgrounding how the language classroom and materials contribute to (social) knowledge construction. Along these lines, EFL textbooks tend to avoid explicitly -and critically- addressing gender identities: they naturalise and reinforce binary and heteronormative ideologies of gender for which there is a ‘natural’ and unequivocal relation between gender, sex and social identity/behaviour. In this paper, we present some preliminary findings of an ongoing research project that investigates how EFL textbook representations of gender are negotiated in a beginner EFL classroom in Montevideo, Uruguay. Our aim is to explore the situated agency of students and teachers in collectively negotiating such representations. Preliminary findings show how through classroom interaction and work ideological spaces are opened to denaturalise gender (as represented by the textbook). Implications discuss gender in terms of the political aims of language education.
Canale et al. (Sat,) studied this question.