Abstract

This paper analyzes the junior high school English textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and adopted in the 2008 school year, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical framework and Jones et al. (1997) as an analytical method. This study examines the discourse roles that each English language textbook assigns to female and male characters when representing them in dialogue sections. This study also examines whether these textbooks implicitly present fixed images of women and men to junior high school students. The analysis revealed that, with the exception of who initiates the conversation in mixed-sex dialogues, the number of occurrences of characters, the number of turns that they take, and the number of words that they use are relatively evenly distributed between female and male characters, with each textbook assigning discourse roles to them in an egalitarian way.