ageism in locally-produced elt materials?: data from an iran study

Learning materials in general and textbooks in particular are generally considered as forces socializing learners into thinking and/or behaving in specific ways, especially with regard to how they represent various aspects of social reality. their content should thus be held to close critical scrutiny by educational researchers and practitioners alike, lest they contain subliminal detrimental messages about how certain marginalized groups in society are (to be) viewed. age, as a social marker likely to evoke certain (stereotypic) roles and identity configurations, and the way it is reflected in/through learning materials has not received due attention in the treatment of english language teaching materials. in keeping with this and to help redress the imbalance, the present content analytic research aimed at unpacking any likely representational patterns in the rendition of the elderly in english school textbooks. to this end, all clauses in the iranian secondary-school english textbooks containing direct or context-retrieved references to the elderly were isolated and probed into using the analytical tools of systemic functional linguistics. initially, the results of the study attested to the under-representation in the data of the said social group. further linguistic analysis of the prospect series and vision series showed that the elderly is in the main (mis)represented as an age group who lead a highly tender life informed, inter alia, by disease and a sedentary lifestyle. the seniors are additionally rendered as passive objects of care and respect of other age groups rather than as participating members of society. the implications of the study for various educational arena stakeholders are finally drawn and delineated.