A Gender Evaluation Of Integrated Business English Textbooks

At present, many EFL textbooks evaluation theories are applied to evaluate EFL textbooks from internal, external or other aspects. Social and cultural value in the EFL textbooks is always neglected so there are few theoretic and applied studies which evaluate textbooks from the perspective of gender. Alan Cunningsworth (2002) chooses the coursebook according to the coursebook package, linguistic content (including grammar, lexical, phonology and so on), linguistic skills, teaching methodology and so on. At the same time, he points out that people should also evaluate the textbooks from the aspect of social culture. He mentions the gender bias in the textbooks. From above, the gender issue is one of the aspects which can not be neglected when we choose the textbooks.This paper tries to evaluate the integrated Business English textbooks from gender perspective. The research questions are as follows:1. What is the nature of gender representation in the integrated Business English textbooks?2. Are there any differences between this study and former studies? What are the main differences? What are the reasons for the differences?3. What are the implications for Chinese Business English teaching and Business English textbooks development in the future?This paper tries to adopt the evaluation methodology of Porreca (1984) to evaluate integrated Business English textbooks and survey the students'perception by questionnaires. Based on the analysis, we draw the following conclusions:firstly, as for the gender representation of the studied Business English textbooks:1. in content analysis, the frequency of male and that of female in the illustration and texts of the studied textbooks do not differ very much respectively; in terms of the frequency of main characters in the textbooks, the frequency of male occurs much higher than that of female; more males are employed than females and there are more employment positions for males than for females.2. In linguistic analysis, masculine generic constructions, firstness and courtesy titles (Ms., Miss. and Mrs.) are studied and it is found that the language is rather standard to some extent. Secondly, compared with the former studies, this study shows rather optimistic results for the studied Business English textbooks, though there is plenty of room for improvement. Compared with the results of Porreca (1984), the results are different due to the following reasons:1. With the social change and economic development, female role is improving.2. With the continuous feminism activities, the gender awareness is strengthened. Compared with the results of Thomson & Otsuji (2003), the gender issues of the studied Business English textbooks in this research are greatly improved mainly due to the different cultures. People in China and Japan have different opinions toward gender role. So the gender role differs in the different cultures.Based on the above conclusion and the teachers'interview, we try to give some implications for the future Business English teaching and Business English textbook compilation. At last, the limitations and the future research of this study are pointed out.