• Corpus ID: 62806166

Subliminal Culture, Sexism and Hidden Curriculum in the Internationally Distributed Interchange Textbooks

@inproceedings{Kazemi2013SubliminalCS,
  title={Subliminal Culture, Sexism and Hidden Curriculum in the Internationally Distributed Interchange Textbooks},
  author={Seyyed Ali Kazemi and Nader Assadi Aidinlou and Seyyed Yousef Savaedi and Maryam Alaviniya},
  year={2013}
}

• S. A. Kazemi, Nader Assadi Aidinlou, +1 author Maryam Alaviniya
• Published 2013
• Sociology

This study sought to explore the culture, hidden curriculum and ideological import of the internationally distributed Interchange textbooks. It was intended to find out whether a recurrent ideological pattern and violation of the ethical standards of particular societies could be observed. To this end, the theory and procedures of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as expounded by Fairclough (1989), were applied to conversations, reading passages and illustrations in these textbooks and three dimensions of meaning - the social relations, their subject positions, and the content of the texts - were categorized and statistically analyzed. It was also an attempt to examine the status of sexism in the Interchange textbooks. To do so, two types of analysis were performed to examine the manifestations of sexist attitudes and values in four textbooks. First, a systematic quantitative content analysis was carried out with reference to sex visibility and female/male topic presentation in conversations, reading passages, and illustrations. Secondly, a qualitative inquiry was made into sex-linked job possibilities, sex-based activity types, stereotyped sex roles, firstness, and masculine generic conception. In general, the findings revealed that the internationally distributed Interchange textbooks are culture-biased and tend to represent a particular discourse type, i.e. the discourse of western culture, lifestyle, economy and consumer society which imposes a western sanctioned view. Moreover, the analysis showed that family, as the key component in Islamic societies, is deemphasized in the Interchange series. Results also revealed that these textbooks turn to be sexist in terms of invisibility of men. This can be a step forward in material preparation to consider women as first-class citizens. Meanwhile, in Islamic countries, it can be considered as an instrumental look at women to make these books more attractive and popular. Interestingly, these books cannot be considered sexist in terms of stereotyping a particular sex.