Gender Identity in Verb Type Occurrences: A Study of ‘Active’ Series

The present research was an attempt to investigate gender portrayal represented in EFL reading textbooks. Using Johnson and Young’s (2002) verb taxonomy, the reading passages of the four books of the Active Skills for Reading series were selected as the corpus. Qualitative content analysis was employed to identify the type and frequency of verb categories including, action, competition/destruction, agency/control, limited, state, feeling and nurturing, and negative verbs. Based on the results of statistical analysis, no significant difference was demonstrated in frequencies of verb types assigned to each gender other than in Action and Limited verb elements which were biased toward males. Moreover, it was revealed that males were assigned to some social roles which were traditionally attributed to female characters. In addition, the findings revealed that there was no significant difference between doer vs. receiver roles allocated to male and female characters. The results of the study can shed more light on micro and macro policymaking in the area of education, language teaching, curriculum development, and materials preparation for EFL courses.