Discourse Roles, Gender and Language Textbook Dialogues: Who learns what from John and Sally?

ABSTRACT Much work has been done on gender stereotyping in textbooks for foreign language teaching. However, little has focused on the language of dialogues, which are a characteristic feature of language textbooks. In the light of this gap, this article describes the author's own study analysing discourse roles in dialogues in three recent text books for the teaching of English as a foreign language. The results showed an encouraging level of gender fairness. The authors then explore whether this fairness was achieved through the creation of gender balance in social and occupational roles, and suggest that this was so in the case of these three books. They also discuss the negative implications of gender-imbalanced dialogues for female students + language practice opportunities. This study has implications for language teachers, teacher educators, and writers and publishers of language teaching materials.