gender representation in ili instructional materials: the case of act conversation series

Textbooks are known to be the beating heart of any education system, especially efl/esl programs. therefore, textbooks play a significant role in shaping students thoughts, and evaluating their content seems a necessity. this study aims to investigate how gender is represented in the act textbooks, a newly developed conversation series by the iran language institute. to this end, four students’ textbooks were selected randomly and scrutinized by the researchers based on the checklist developed by lee and mahmoudi (2020). the manual analyses of selected materials revealed gender bias regarding the visibility of males in textbooks’ images. while women’s presence was underestimated in the pictorial content of the books and the majority of their activities were attached to household affairs. thus, it can be concluded that these textbooks perpetuate islamic gender ideology regarding the presence of women presence in society. these results corroborate the findings of previous studies in the context of iran and ring the bells for material developers to enhance their gender awareness and pursuit more equality in their textbooks. the results of this study can be helpful for the materials developers and syllabus and curriculum designers in the ili to revise the current textbook according to the needs of students and teachers to use appropriate teaching techniques to compensate for the deficiencies of the textbook.