When looking at the first typology „initiating a dialogue‟ over-representation of female characters appears in only one out of eight selected textbooks: Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2. As mentioned earlier, Sunderland (2000) noted that a 1997 textbook featured only one male character in a speaking exercise for students to practice starting up a conversation. The implications were that girls did not have the opportunity to practice this language function. Today, it appears that the opposite is occurring with Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 where 50% of the dialogues are initiated by female characters. In Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2, the neutral character „Interviewer‟ accounts for one out of six dialogue initiations. Depending on how a teacher handles that dialogue in the EFL classroom, „Interviewer‟ might be defined
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as male or female. Therefore, the neutral character might be used as a flexible solution to promote equal opportunities for all learners to practice. As Sunderland (1998) noted, teachers can use un-biased texts in biased ways and conversely use biased texts in un- biased ways. It is also worth mentioning that in Tiếng Anh 8 tập 2, none of the dialogues was initiated by female characters. There is not any neutral character in this textbook, resulting in the fact that girls who learn this textbook have little chance to practice dialogue initiations. In a different picture, Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2 has succeeded in creating an equal balance in the number of dialogues initiated by the two genders. In this textbook, 2 dialogues, accounting for 33.3%, were initiated by each gender.
Regarding the typology „turns taken‟, the textbooks over-represented female characters are Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2. It was a coincidence that in both textbooks, 46.1% of turns taken are allocated to female characters. While girls are given more opportunities to speak in Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2 judging by the number of female characters‟ turns, boys are not necessarily excluded as they may be assigned neutral roles. As mentioned before, it is up to the teachers to determine how the dialogues are held and the equal opportunities to practice speaking are provided for all learners.
Tiếng Anh 7 tập 1 demonstrated a little over-representation in terms of conversational turns, male characters have 4 more turns (5.6%) than female characters. In stark contrast, Tiếng Anh 6 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 showed a great gap between how many turns female and male characters take in the dialogues. In the former, female characters accounted for 19 turns whereas male characters account for 63 turns. In the latter, the male character took nearly nine times as many as turns as the female (61 turns versus 7 turns).
For the typology „number of characters‟, Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2 are still the only textbooks over-representing female characters. In both of them, there are eight female characters and seven male characters so the difference is very little. Meanwhile, Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 witnessed a marked over-representation of the male when it comes to this typology. The number of male characters is four times as many as that of female
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characters. It is worth mentioning that in Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 there are three same-gender dialogues which are between men. As a result, the speaking opportunities for girls are only available if they are willing to take on a male role in those lessons. A similar situation appears in Tiếng Anh 6 tập 2, which tends to use far more male characters than female characters in dialogues (10 male characters compared to 3 male characters). All of the same-gender dialogues in Tiếng Anh 6 tập 2 are between male characters. Tiếng Anh 7 tập 1 has succeeded in creating an equal balance in the number of female and male characters. In this textbook, 6 female characters accounted for 42.9% and 7 male characters occupied 50%.
Regarding the words used, Tiếng Anh 7 tập 1 allocated exactly the same amount of words to both female and male characters (381 words). Meanwhile, Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2 allocated more words to female characters (530 words and 626 words versus 452 words and 504 words respectively). Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 presented a significant over- representation of male characters in this typology. In this textbook, the male character used somewhere in the vicinity of eight times as many as words as the female (805 words versus 98 words). The over-representation could have been avoided with the introduction of mixed-gendered dialogues rather than same-gendered. That may be why the textbook authors made an effort to designed 100% mixed-gender dialogue in Tiếng Anh 6 tập 1. As a matter of fact, whether same-gender dialogues exclude some learners in the classroom is still not known. However, as Sunderland (2000) pointed out in her study of German class, girls were more willing to take on male character roles and boys were unwilling to take on female roles.
From the results of this study on dialogues, it is clear that Vietnamese lower secondary school EFL textbooks are gender biased. However, the over-representations are different in each investigated textbook. Among six textbooks that over-represent male characters, Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 presents the most striking over-representation, whereas a slight gender bias is found in the ones which treat women prior to men, namely Tiếng Anh 7 tập 2 and Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2. It is also worth mentioning that female characters are excluded
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completely in half of the dialogues in Tiếng Anh 6 tập 2, Tiếng Anh 8 tập 1 and Tiếng Anh 8 tập 2.
It appears that there is an improvement of gender bias in dialogues from the textbooks published in 2013 to the textbooks published in 2016. The oldest textbook in this study, Tiếng Anh 6 tập 1 and Tiếng Anh 6 tập 2, published in 2013, over-represented male characters in all of the investigated typologies, while the newest textbook in this research Tiếng Anh 9 tập 2, published in 2016, witnessed a little over-representation of female characters in dialogues. In this limited study of eight textbooks, we see that the shift from male-dominated dialogues to more female-dominated dialogues is correlated to the publication date. It is important to remember that this study included only eight textbooks and is quantitative. It was not taken into account qualitative data which may provide a different picture.