Un enfoque comunicativo desde la perspectiva de género en la clase de inglés de secundaria: un estudio a pequeña escala

The implicit ideology behind sexist proverbs and sayings such as who has a fair wife needs more than two eyes; many women, many words, many geese, many turds; a woman without a man is like a handle without a pan or a good wife is a perfect lady in the living room, a good cook in the kitchen, and a harlot in the bedroom proves that we have been living in a men’s world, made by men and for men, for a very long time. As a matter of fact, male chauvinism is quite deep-rooted in the Spanish patriarchal society and, therefore, gender stereotypes still seem very resistant to change. However, it is undeniable that gender awareness has also positively increased in the last few decades. Nevertheless, this gender awareness is not present everywhere and in the same way. That is to say, taking the education field as an example, both the national and the regional curricula of the obligatory secondary education make explicit reference to the education system’s duty to promote initiatives and measures to raise gender awareness, yet this duty is not so extensively carried out in the everyday teaching practice. Thereby, this dissertation claims that gender awareness is not addressed in secondary education classes on a daily basis and even less so in the EFL class. The aforementioned thesis statement leads one to wonder whether the instructional resources and teaching aids used in the EFL class take the gender awareness into consideration or not. This research question has to do with the fact that the curricula clearly state that gender equality should be promoted in class but it turns out that it is not completely like this. Thus, textbooks, which are supposed to be designed in compliance with the curricular goals, should also promote this value, or at least, they should be free of gender bias, but is it really so? Does the representation of gender in textbooks reinforce or fight against gender stereotypes? Together with the goal of answering this key research question, this dissertation would like to achieve the following objectives: 1) to define gender stereotypes and the influence of school in their promotion and justify why the EFL context may be the adequate site to fight against this so-called gender bias; 2) to create a list of criteria which will allow me to spot all the existing marks of gender stereotypes in the teaching materials used in the EFL class; 3) to test this checklist as a double-edged tool: on the one hand, it will allow me to analyse the results and conclude whether instructional materials are gender-biased or not and, on the other hand, it will let me design curricular activities, both according to the results and keeping the gender awareness in mind; 4) to demonstrate that it is possible for contemporary teachers to adapt, revise and/or create EFL materials that show the social awareness with gender issues. All in all, I hope that at the end of this study I will have been able to detect to what extent some instructional materials used in the EFL class may be gender-biased, although the curricula expect the contrary, as well as to create a tool aimed at analysing and designing bias-free activities, which will probably be highly efficient when it comes to raising gender awareness in students