Intersections of Gender and Ethnicity in English Language Learning Texts 1666916781, 9781666916782

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Intersections of Gender and Ethnicity in English Language Learning Texts

Intersections of Gender and Ethnicity in English Language Learning Texts Amy Burden

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burden, Amy, 1986- author.   Title: Intersections of gender and ethnicity in English language learning texts / Amy Burden.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023015948 (print) | LCCN 2023015949 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666916782 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666916799 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Textbook bias--United States. | English language--Textbooks. | English language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers--Social aspects--United States.  Classification: LCC LB3045.6 .B87 2023  (print) | LCC LB3045.6  (ebook) | DDC 371.3/2--dc23/eng/20230512  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015948 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015949 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Abigail, for without her voracious love of reading and fierce feminist spirit, I might never have explored this topic.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Prominent Analytical Theories Chapter 2: Human Character Analysis



Chapter 3: Non-human Character Analysis Chapter 4: The Role of Genre

Appendix Index

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45 65

Chapter 5: Engaging Critical Literacy Bibliography

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119 129

131

About the Author



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vii

Acknowledgments

This book has grown from the processes I undertook to prepare for and write my dissertation: Gender Representation in American Made English Language Learning Textbooks: A Multi-Modal Study. Over the course of six years, I took classes in Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics from my host university in the USA, from University College London in the UK, and from open access courses in South Korea. I read and re-read works from Gee, Fairclough, Sunderland, Janks, and others, slowly piecing together meaning and application. I read countless journal articles where their work was applied to educational contexts, healthcare, courtrooms, newsprint, and political speeches for examples to follow on the more complex concepts. After completing my dissertation in 2020, I began the work seemingly anew as I learned about the applications of ethnicity research. I read and re-read feminist literary theory, Critical Race Theory in various applied contexts, CRP, LatCrit, NatCrit, etc. I joined online forums in discourse and critical discourse analysis and found I was not alone in my quest to comprehend and correctly apply concepts from these theories and frameworks. After more than five years of this mixture of online and face-to-face coursework and countless hours of self-teaching, the idea for the audience of this text was born. Create a work that combines the theories and methods I have searched for, read, learned beneath, and experimented with in an all-in-one text using terminology and examples that are accessible to both the educator and researcher. Less time is squandered in the pursuit of understanding, and more time is spent applying, analyzing, theorizing, investigating, and addressing problems in each person’s context for critical conscientization and change. While this text is not a complete and authoritative anthology on all the applications of the seminal works in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), I do hope this provides a helpful resource to be read alongside these texts to provide context to researchers new to CDA of educational materials. At the same time, I hope this text can be used by educators as well to critically consider their own materials and curricula and aid them in their work of writing ix

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Acknowledgments

equitable materials, analyzing language with their students, and advocating for egalitarian teaching resources within their unique teaching contexts. I am grateful to my husband, Eric, for his support throughout this process. And to my friends and colleagues Shima and Rae for their feedback and encouragement. The support of friends and family is always a critical component of all my successful writing projects. Amy Burden

Introduction

This introduction establishes the premise for this book by considering the dual roles of literacy textbooks in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom for language learning and gender and ethnic socialization through the hidden curriculum. It establishes the need for critical language study using multiple theories and methods for a fuller picture of how gender and ethnicity are represented to young learners from a protected class. I designed this book to combine the techniques I have explored for the last decade and place them together so both researchers new to the study of intersectionality and concerned educators can continue this crucial unearthing for conscientization and transformative action. ABOUT THIS BOOK In the coming chapters, I will share the theories and methods I have used to examine language learning texts, with definitions I believe will be accessible and practical. Following the definitions will be examples of each theory, method, or tool in action with explanations. I will continue with the results of my research employing various methods and strategies and demonstrating their adaptability for different contexts. My last chapter will pull away from the dissection of language and zoom out on the whole text, which is necessary for praxis—for transformative action and redesign—whether in publishing or the language classroom. A Note on Naming I will often collectively refer to theories, methods, and strategies as “tools.” This follows the nomenclature of Dr. John Paul Gee in his work on critical discourse analysis, wherein he refers to the theories and methods he uses to analyze different texts as tools in his discourse analysis toolbox. Thus, for conciseness and accessibility, I will use this same term instead of listing out “theories, methods, and strategies.” I also sometimes use “tools” because I 1

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Introduction

describe one of Gee’s methods. In these situations, I am giving deference to his naming conventions. Why Study Textbooks? Within the ESL classroom, published curricula are valued as important research-based and practical resources for acquiring language. Especially in younger grades, ESL Textbooks play a vital role in providing access to English language education and culture (Toledo-Sandoval, 2020). In the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context, teachers may consider textbooks as the foundation for their teaching, and learners are given contact with English through these texts (Ahmad and Shah, 2014). Textbooks are full of represented human agents, both fictional and nonfictional, who carry out a range of social actions with social consequences that inform the reader about what they can expect in a comparable situation (van Leeuwen, 1996). They explain and instruct the acceptable behavior and worldview of the dominant culture, often excluding minorities. Early constructivists like Giroux, Vygotsky, and Gershuny argued that while textbooks were supposed to instruct the disciplines, they also conveyed norms and presuppositions about “gender roles and social values” (Gershuny, 1977, 150). Textbooks play a significant role in the “hidden curriculum”— what Shardakova and Pavlenko define as the “implicit, ideological values conveyed by the text” (2004, 26). All the values, norms, perspectives, and attitudes society holds are reflected in the language and the textbooks (Lakoff and Bucholtz, 2010). They consciously and subconsciously affect students’ perceptions by how they portray the male and female social actors and their manners in society. An aspect of this book explores whether students will find themselves within their state’s adopted learning materials and whether depictions of minoritized and marginalized peoples within ESL materials use language that honors these groups. Or if these texts instead reproduce a standard or neutral perspective that, through these discursive choices, act to perpetuate colonial ideologies about the supremacy of certain discourses and undermine the identities of language learners who do not match them. The 2020 US Census marks a rise of multilingual households along with regional and global varieties of English spoken in and out of the home. This should necessitate a discourse in language learning textbooks that reflects not only the English of the teachers and administrators that may adhere to Standard American English (SAE) but also the Englishes spoken in the community, especially if a textbook is going to represent diversity within images and texts (Jones, Marks, Ramirez, and Rios-Vargas, 2021). The danger in standardizing the voices of characters of color not only obscures other points of view but denies students

Introduction

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the right to be represented in their learning materials and creates what Basow calls “a curriculum of inferiority” (2010). Language learning textbooks represent a fruitful source of study of their discursive gender and ethnic representations because of the social value of textbooks and their ability to construct for students what it means to be a good citizen, language user, and gendered person. With the rising cost of textbooks in the United States, the amount of state resources allocated to the texts used to educate the most vulnerable populations in the US strengthens the need to critically analyze how they represent gender and ethnicity and what hidden messages are being taught (Kristoff, 2018). Gender and Textbooks In 1972, Title IX was passed, including the prohibition of gender discrimination in any government-funded educational institution in the USA. This included gender bias in materials used for career recruitment but not general educational materials. In 1974, the Women’s Educational Equity Act was passed. This included funding for research and training to help eliminate sexism in schools. This was the first sizeable financial push to work on sex bias in education (Andrews and Garcia, 1994). During the second wave feminist movement, Texas feminists used protests through the National Organization of Women (NOW) and other grassroots feminist organizations to lobby for change in textbook adoptions in Texas. They completed content analyses of textbooks in kindergarten through twelfth grades that were being considered by the Texas Board of Education (TBOE). Their results were sent to publishers who were required by Texas law to respond to each letter sent, which was 177 in all. The result in 1974 was hearings by the TBOE to resolve the content issues raised by the NOW (Hicks, 1974). For the last half-century or so, the USA has published educational materials sub-nationally, with Texas and California having enormous sway in the direction of materials publication and being the first to see and use new materials (Thurman, 2013). While many nations publish curricula nationally, often through the ministry of education, in the USA, it is up to states to decide on the textbooks used in the classroom. As Texas and California have the highest student populations, publishers often write curricula with these two contexts in mind or collaborate with these two boards of education (BOE). Books created with the Texas and California educational desires in mind are then marketed and sold to other states. Therefore, Texas BOE and California BOE often make curricular choices that affect the books read across the USA (Blumberg, 2015). Two large educational governing bodies with political and ideological motivations tell publishers like Houghton

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Introduction

Mifflin, Pearson Longman, and Benchmark Education what they want to see and read. Those books are published nationwide (Blumberg, 2015). For this reason, I will examine 12 textbooks of Rigby—a Houghton Mifflin Company and Benchmark Education Company for the Texas and California ESL classrooms, respectively. The first studies of ESL textbooks in the USA that focused on gender representation began in 1978 with Hartman and Judd. They found overt sexism in American and British ESL textbooks, including gendered slurs. Their contribution is significant for its consciousness-raising efforts and the analysis of “firstness” that had not been examined at that point in educational materials. They defined “firstness” as: . . . the ordering of sex pairs like male and female, Mr. and Mrs., brother and sister, husband and wife, which are usually ordered with the male first, except ladies and gentlemen. While this may be a minor point, such automatic ordering reinforces the second-place status of women and could, with little effort, be avoided by mixing the order (390).

This study is kairotic as this was just four years after second-wave feminism spread across the USA, making deliberate efforts at changing the policies regarding gender in education (Blumberg, 2015). Karen Porreca undertook another pioneering study on sexism in ESL textbooks to address gaps in Hartman and Judd’s analysis. In addition to including all the elements of Hartman and Judd’s 1978 study, Porreca used a systematic quantitative content analysis approach to examine 15 purposefully selected ESL textbooks. Her work has repeatedly been named as foundational for educational textbook analysis, particularly with English language texts. (Porreca,1984) Since 1984, few studies of ESL texts produced for US public schools have been conducted. The 1990s saw the second generation of gender analysis studies in the USA. While ESL textbooks for the US classroom were rarely included in these second-generation studies, mainstream content areas were. US History and World History textbooks were examined in 2004. Clark and Mahoney found only moderate gains in gender representation from textbook studies done in the 1980s for US History and even lower gains for World History books. Children’s illustrated books saw only a 2% increase in female visibility from the 1980s to 1999. (Davis and McDaniel, 1999). These content area studies show that while the intensity of bias is diminishing, representation and positioning of females in educational materials have made only modest gains since the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s. State BOEs and Secretaries of Education moved on from gender issues because overt

Introduction

5

sexism had decreased or because the powerful felt it was not a big enough problem to continue contributing (Blumberg, 2015). Ethnicity in Textbooks In addition to addressing issues within gender representation, this text will examine the intersections of gender with ethnicity in language texts to determine what representations are presented to the reader. Therefore, reviewing the significant ways influential neoconservatives have shaped ethnicity representations in school literature is essential. While textbooks are pedagogically motivated, neoconservatives in powerful positions often use textbooks to influence students beyond documented curricular intentions, as mentioned previously about gender and language norms. Another way this has been seen historically in content textbooks is in history textbooks in the Southern United States. “The Lost Cause” is an intellectual movement that imparts a distorted view of Civil War history by preserving the South’s perspective, which frames the Confederates’ cause as heroic. It glorifies Confederate soldiers, explains slavery as a benevolent institution, and hides its role in the Civil War. Elite Antebellum families in the 1950s used their social and political influence to spread these tenets through school history textbooks, demonstrating the reach of the powerful into the school curriculum to promote their narrative and shape the ideologies surrounding race taught to Southern school children (Cox, 2003). By explicitly examining US and World History textbooks in US classrooms, researchers found a scarcity of minorities within the text. In Lucy, Demskey, Bromley, and Jurafsky’s 2020 study, they examined Texas US history books, where the shortage of minority studies is incredibly relevant as Texas’ student population is now over 50% Latinx. Through their content analysis, the most frequently named people were men in politics. Out of the top 50 most often named people, only one woman is included—Eleanor Roosevelt. Of those top 50, only four were non-white. Verb analysis in their study also demonstrated that black people were depicted with less power and agency than other social groups and were more closely tied to topics of slavery. At the same time, women were more strongly connected to domestic activities (Lucy et al., 2020). When children’s schoolbooks associate people of color with achievements, research shows that figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are associated with his work on social segregation and view the Civil Rights Movement as a distant, social, and successful (i.e., completed) movement with very little contemporary relevance. Through qualitative content analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in elementary, middle, and high school history books in the USA, researchers Bickford and Byas also found that within biographical

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Introduction

stories about King, any language regarding white supremacy or white hate groups and details of his assassination were minimized or omitted (Bickford and Byas, 2019). Another example of the reach of the neoconservative powerful into the curricular choices of the classroom considers how textbooks instruct English language and grammar. The preference for “Standard American English” (SAE) to the detriment of all other ways of knowing and communicating is one way the powerful use curriculum to disenfranchise the poor (Cunningham, 2017). The ideology that there is one “good” discourse style acts to limit and exclude multilingual voices. It does not reflect the valuable modes of English in local, global, and digital environments. Furthermore, SAE has roots in pre-Civil War America as a distinguisher between social elites and the socially inferior. Nonetheless, books like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (1918, 1959, & 2019) are still on Amazon’s top 10 list in multiple disciplines, reflecting schools’ dissatisfaction with non-standard writing and the belief in language learning materials to correct it (Lisbeth, 2017). But, according to many linguists, there is nothing to correct about Englishes that differ from “standard”—this is a way the educational system continually silences students who are not born into the majority culture (Perryman-Clark, Kirkland, Jackson, and Smitherman, 2015). In this way, English textbooks that insist on SAE and the elimination of linguistic variety weaponize ideologies purposely developed to differentiate between the haves and have-nots through linguistic discrimination. To continue, it is also important to consider how racial and ethnic representations in children’s literature impact learning. Some of what is known about ethnicity in fiction and non-fiction genres is that the race of the characters in the story has been shown to correlate positively with the race of the reader. Students who see themselves in the story are likelier to choose this story for further reading (Hardy, Pennington, Griffin, and Jacobi-Vessels, 2021). Despite this knowledge, the world depicted in children’s fiction is still overwhelmingly white (Crisp, Knezik, Quinn, Bingham, Girardeau, and Starks, 2016). Only about 11% of children’s fiction published in 2014 contained “significant content, topics, characters, or themes about African or African American, American Indian, Asian/Pacific or Asian/Pacific American, or Latino or Latino American people.” (Horning, Lindgren, Schliesman, and Townsend 2015). When diverse characters are present in children’s fiction, the results can increase engagement for students of color (Hardy et al., 2021). However, children’s fiction has been shown to privilege white ways of seeing diversity by omitting the voices of diverse families, such as in Sun’s 2021 study on representations of transracial Chinese characters in children’s picture books with adoption themes. The biological (Chinese) family voices are often omitted, and their culture and context are oversimplified, which

Introduction

7

insinuates the inadequacy or absence of birth parents in favor of the perspectives of the white parents who adopt Chinese children. Despite having very little research about gender and ethnic representations in ESL materials for the US K–12 contexts, by examining the research on curricular choices in mainstream content areas such as English Language Arts, US, and World History, researchers can establish a baseline for what forms hypotheses and asking questions about ESL texts. In what follows, I will describe my data set and research questions formed based on what is known from these previous works. THE DATA I investigated the discursive representations of gender and ethnicity in two series of English Language Development (ELD) textbooks in the largest markets in the USA—Texas and California (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). My data comprises 12 books spanning six instructional levels, from kindergarten through grade 5, named On Our Way to English: Texas, volumes K-5 (Freeman, 2012) and California Benchmark Advance: Texts for English Language Development, California volumes K-5 (Reyes, 2018). Together, 2.4 million young readers each year have been exposed to these texts in California and Texas alone (Sanchez, 2017). For each series, I only included readings containing instructions for language production that incorporated linguistic references to gender. While reading in general in one’s second language is beneficial, I focused on readings that contain instructions for production and references to gender. I wanted to explore the students’ opportunities for engagement with the texts that I knew would have gendered characters as a starting point for both gender and ethnicity analyses. Readings with instructions for production will be more likely to receive multiple passes through several modalities and encourage more significant acquisition and uptake of vocabulary, themes, and the hidden curriculum. On Our Way to English: Texas This textbook series is the state version of the (OOWTE) On Our Way to English national series. As such, it includes more references to Texas history, more readings about specific cultures represented within the state, and geographical references within the readings. This series relies quite heavily on images. For this reason, my linguistic analysis will occasionally show a smaller sample size than the Benchmark series. There were large images and

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Introduction

pages of vocabulary only or extended readings with no gender reference; fewer words were analyzed compared to Benchmark. Benchmark Advance: Texts for English Language Development, California This is a state version of the national series and contains seven textbooks. To compare with OOWTE, I only analyzed books from kindergarten through grade 5. The most noticeable difference between the state and national series is that the California series is paperback, and the national series is hardback. Additionally, a copy of the California state ELD standards can be found on the back cover of the state series. Otherwise, the series for state and national are the same. Each book in this series contained ten units. This series had more stories to analyze linguistically because the 10-unit book may have up to 10 readings per unit. There were far fewer images in this series than in OOWTE. There were one to three small images per page. In OOWTE, there were typically four images per page or entire pages devoted to one detailed image. For this reason, there are greater quantities of linguistic phenomena to report in Benchmark. CONCLUSION Using various tools for critical language study, I will address three specific questions I had regarding ESL textbooks made for young learners in the USA. First, how are gender and ethnicity discursively represented to the reader? What is in the text and what is not, and how does that impact the hidden curriculum? Second, what differences exist between how humans and non-humans represent gender and ethnicity discursively? Since non-humans are often used to market products to consumers, especially children (think Kool-Aid Man, Toucan Sam, and Chester the Cheetah), it is essential to understand the discourse of non-humans in these texts. Third, what role does genre play in the representation of gender and its intersection with ethnicity? Are specific genres more responsible than others for perpetuating gender and ethnic biases? Are there genres that promote more egalitarian ideas? Finally, what is the interdependent nature of dominion, access, design, and diversity within the text, and what are the implications of these findings on the classroom, school, and community levels? A checklist of the theories and models I will explore follows. These will enjoy significant re-use throughout the text. For this reason, I do not place chapter markers beside each tool. However, their introductions in the text do follow this order.

Introduction

• • • • • • • • • •

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Fairclough’s Critical Dialectal Approach to CDA Gee’s D/discourse Analysis Framework Critical Race Theory Corpus Linguistics Gee’s Tools for Genre Analysis Figured worlds Intertextual Context Janks’ Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy Critical Race Pedagogy Anya’s Language Program Materials Analysis for Antiracist, Equity-minded, Inclusive Practices

Chapter 1

Prominent Analytical Theories

INTRODUCTION Over the last three decades, content and linguistic analyses of language textbooks for gender and ethnicity construction and representation have found issues regarding sexism, discrimination, minimization, whitewashing, and stereotyping, among other issues. While these studies have provided valuable insights into the treatment of gender or race in educational materials, they are limited by sparse data collection, shallow analysis through the choice of methodology, or narrow scope. As I worked to uncover and compile tools that would attend to these shortcomings, I began to see the necessity of including them all in one place and engaging in multiple methods of analysis with a broader scope that encompasses more than one area of interrogation to not only facilitate the research process for future endeavors but to demonstrate how multiple angles can provide a clearer picture of each area of interrogation when analyzed together. This chapter focuses on the key theories and frameworks needed for Critical Discourse Analysis of learning materials. Subsequent chapters rely first on these theories and frameworks before adding in analytical tools from outside linguistics for a richer description and interpretation. Key Terms First, it is essential to define gender and ethnicity as these terms tend to be fluid. My definitions will not encompass all the varying degrees to which these words are defined and used but will set a baseline for how I will use them in the remainder of this text. According to Talbot, gender is a learned behavior while sex is biologically founded. Gender is socially constructed and is learned and is not binary. People are gendered through the acquisition 11

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of behaviors which are perceived as masculine or feminine (Talbot, 2010). Gender, as used in this book, is a learned behavior and is socially constructed, which is one reason I am interested in its representation in my chosen data set. How will gender be constructed for the reader? When I use the terms “male” or “female”, “man” or “woman”, and/or “sex” these will refer to grammatical or lexical indicators in the text. He/she are gendered pronouns. When the authors use these, I may indicate that the sex of the character referenced is male or female based on the grammatical construction in the text. Detailed linguistic analysis will explore how the gender of the characters is constructed and presented to the reader. I use the word ethnicity throughout this book because ethnicity is more encompassing than the term “race.” According to Martin and Nakayama, ethnicity reflects a person’s cultural and racial background and is often established based on a person’s sense of belonging to a particular group through self-identification, knowledge of the history/customs of the culture, and feelings about belonging to a group. It pertains to a person’s cultural identity, including nationality, religion, geographic region, languages, dress, customs, and indigenous heritage (Martin and Nakayama, 2018). Because the audience for these textbooks is varied along ethnic lines such as home language and not racial lines like physical characteristics, I choose to use what I find a more inclusive, anthropological term—ethnicity. Race, on the other hand, while also socially constructed, focuses on the physical characteristics of a person with no biological basis that has been weaponized to segregate humans based on physical characteristics, which, unlike some ethnic traits, cannot be hidden, ignored, adopted, or broadened. Both terms have been used by majority cultures to oppress and subjugate (Martin and Nakayama, 2018). However, one hope I had with my research was that ESL textbooks would contain greater variety in ethnic representation—or authentic representation of a variety of religious, national, linguistic, and cultural identities represented and studied to honor and celebrate people who identify in these ways. Fairclough’s Critical Dialectal Approach I begin with an overview of Fairclough’s Framework for CDA and how I implement it to analyze human characters for gender and ethnicity representations in the series. Critical Discourse Analysis is a branch of sociolinguistics that takes an interventionist approach to language use. CDA is an application of critical theory, which is any theory concerned with critiquing ideology and domination (Fairclough, 1989). CDA considers elements of authority, power, control, and discrimination. There are two main assumptions of CDA: discourse is a social event that is related to the speaker’s selections of vocabulary as well as grammar that is principled and systematic (Fowler,

Prominent Analytical Theories

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Hodge, Kress, and Trew, 1979). The purpose of CDA is to make clear the opaque elements of language that lead to or protect unequal distributions of power to ultimately change the existing social reality (Wodak and Meyer, 2001; Fairclough, 2015). For this study, I implemented Fairclough’s Dialectal Relational Approach. This reflects an examination of the power behind discourse, not just the power in discourse. It also sets an agenda for critical consciousness-raising regarding the contribution language makes to the act of domination. Fairclough’s approach explains how it relates to other elements in the existing reality. His approach is described more specifically through its three interrelated stages: description, interpretation, and explanation (Fairclough, 2015). Description entails a linguistic uncovering of the text and regards the grammar and vocabulary as choices from among the options available. To interpret the features of the text, it is vital to realize what other ways meaning could have been made syntactically or semantically. To critically describe a text, the analyst must shift back and forth between what is there and what is not. In Fairclough’s book Language and Power, he provides ten questions the analyst can ask about a text during the description phase; the analyst uses these to ask about the experiential, relational, and expressive value of words and grammatical features, including simple vs. complex sentences, figurative language, and other larger scale structures (Fairclough, 2015). Interpretation is the second phase which concerns participants’ production processes and text interpretation by the analyst. Interpretations are generated by what is in the text (descriptions) and what is “in” the interpreter. This can also be referred to as the interpreter’s background knowledge or “member resources,” which are cued by textual features (descriptions). Additionally, the analyst can learn what assumptions are ideological by discussing “common sense” assumptions. The reliance on background assumptions and the discourse processes at work in production is the concern of the Interpretation phase, where text and social structures share an indirect relationship. Fairclough lists five categories to consult when interpreting what is seen and what is not: meaning of utterance, local coherence, text structure and point, situational context, and intertextual context. Description and Interpretation Intertwined This framework does not insist on completing one stage and then beginning a second, but a back-and-forth describing and interpreting, checking interpretations against descriptions before revising them through the ebb and flow of analysis. Here is an example.

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California’s Benchmark Advance Grade 1’s “The Princess and the Pea.” is a first-grade ESL reading; there are very few words and frequent images to assist a novice. A quote from this short reading is as follows: 1.  “The prince traveled all over the world to find his true princess, but there was always something not quite right.” We learn the experiential value of the words in this utterance through attention to subject-verb agreement. The subject of the sentence, “the prince,” is the agent, the doer in the story. He acts upon the verb phrase “traveled . . . to find.” The direct object “his true princess” reveals the princess as the receiver, the done-to and the possessed in this utterance. The relational value of this utterance is where the text analysis gets interesting. The possessive pronoun “his” is used directly preceding the object, “true princess.” The agent in this utterance, the prince, shows ownership of the receiver, the princess, through the possessive pronoun “his.” This mixing of Fairclough’s questions about words and grammatical features begins to peel away at the ideologies present in this tale. This analysis further questions the expressive value of the words and grammatical features. Lest the novice reader has any doubt as to the expressive value—the identities of prince and princess—the next page in the student book has a grammar check on nouns which includes four—king, prince, knight, and princess—with cartoon drawings of each and a discussion question beneath asking the reader to decide which person holds the most power. This assumes that these characters have degrees of power within their identities as prince and princess and that there is a degree of separation. Returning to the utterance, examining the expressive value of grammatical features reveals that the adjective “true” describes the princess, while there are no adjectives to describe the prince. The adjective insinuates the ability to be untrue or false since the prince had to search for a true princess. The lack of description for the prince could lead the reader to assume that there is no test for truth in princes, that perhaps a prince is automatically true, but that the same cannot be said for princesses. The power differential is established here and questioned non-critically on the next page. Continuing to examine the expressive value of grammatical features, the second independent clause, “there was always something not quite right,” does not have an explicit predicate for the “be” verb, but instead uses the pronoun “something.” A missing prepositional phrase at the end—“about. . . . ”—would have indicated the subject of the independent clause. Instead, because of the existential “there” at the start of the clause the reader must infer what that “something” that is not right could be. In this case, the reader

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will assume that something is related to the character or appearance of the princess being sought. The interpretation phase, which has five categories, moves forward and backward in analysis. The first category, the meaning of the utterance, asks the analyst to look at the expressive, relational, and experiential values of words and grammatical features and combine them to discuss the implications of larger portions of the text. This work was started above while in the description stage. The agent and doer in the text—prince, who, through lack of description, seems to be absolved from any truth tests—is responsible for finding a princess who is not only true but will be his to own, suggesting a power differential that places the prince in a dominative stance over the princess before the reader ever meets her. This back-and-forth work of description and interpretation is not a stopping point for the analyst using Fairclough’s approach to CDA. Fairclough’s third stage—explanation—will receive further demonstration in chapter 5. Gee’s D/discourse Analysis Throughout this book, Gee’s work in D/discourse analysis will be used as a framework secondary inquiry. His work concerns the theory that language enacts social activities, identities, and politics. He believes language is everywhere and always political, far beyond simply getting and receiving information. Gee’s 2011 text is written clearly and simply with tools, methods, strategies, and examples, which I choose to apply not only for their appropriateness to the discourse under scrutiny but also because different approaches to different issues and different genres of writing are more suitable than others. It is essential then, as analysts of language-in-use, that a working knowledge of a variety of well-tested approaches be at the ready, especially in large and varied data sets such as textbooks and literacy materials with multiple genres and both literature and contrived works for language and literacy. Gee calls his framework D/discourse Analysis because of the dichotomy he seeks to create. Applied linguists and sociolinguists are interested in what Gee calls language “on-site,” with particular consideration in this book to how it enacts identities—which is what Gee calls “little d” discourse. Big D Discourses are involved when nonverbal communication, symbols, and actions are enacted alongside “language-in-use” to construct identities (2005). Gee’s work uses plain language for discourse analysis and building things through language, making his strategies approachable and applicable throughout the three stages of Fairclough’s framework for Critical Discourse Analysis. I will often refer to Gee’s tools as they apply to the three stages of Fairclough’s Framework.

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For example, the description stage relies on grammar and vocabulary analysis at word, sentence, story, and intertextual levels, shifting back and forth between what is and is not there. In the story called “How Water Came to Dry Lands,” from On Our Way to English: Texas Grade Four, the Subject Tool can be applied to understand why the authors organized information on the sentence level and to shift from what is there to what could’ve been and what is not. The Subject Tool asks analysts to look at the subjects and predicates as: the topic = subject and information about the topic= predicate. Just examining the story’s title, “How Water Came to Dry Lands,” the authors chose passive voice—“water came.” So, the topic is “water” and is the center of attention before the reader begins the story. Authors choose subjects to set up how listeners should manage information as they read and how they should view what they are reading about. Throughout the book, I will demonstrate more of Gee’s tools for D/discourse Analysis. I will also explore the story above in more detail in chapter three. Critical Race Theory Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a theory with a framework developed in legal disciplines to understand and criticize the role of race in law (Guinier, 1991). However, it has since been applied to many fields and disciplines to examine the systemic nature of racism within them. The tenets of CRT are: racism is deeply and invisibly enmeshed in institutions (such as schools) to the point that disparities between Whites and people of color as considered “normal”; objectivity, meritocracy, and race neutrality are liberal myths; Whiteness is a socially constructed property that conveys privileges; voices of people of color and their experiential knowledge are legitimate and authoritative sources of evidence and theory generation and their counternarratives challenge dominant ideologies of white supremacy; people of color experience racism in ways linked with and heightened by intersections with sexism, classism, and homophobia among others (Anya, 2021a). To follow is an analysis of intersectionality in a story from Grade 3 unit 7 of OOWTE. The reading is called “A Citizen of the United States.” The reading focuses on Lourdes, a Cuban immigrant to the USA who became a citizen at age 18. The first two sentences of the reading state that first, she was born in Cuba and then, 2.  “Even so, she became a citizen of the United States.”

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It is important to note that the author uses third person singular “she.” This story is not written from Lourdes’s perspective but the author’s, which speaks to whether this story could qualify as a counternarrative. It does not. Secondly, the phrase “even so” is often synonymous with “despite that” or “nevertheless” and is typically used between two things that are not seen as equal. Lexico, the free version of Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, uses this example, “not the most exciting of places, but even so, I was having a good time” (Lexico, 2022). Thus, Cuba, where Lourdes was born, has a connotation of inequality with the United States, where she lives now, thus subtly perpetuating ethnocentrism. As noted in CRP work, this perpetuates the culture of power that reproduces racial and ethnic hierarchies (Jennings and Lynn, 2005). The reading goes on to emphasize that Lourdes had to be able to read and write English, followed directly by a short recount of Lourdes taking an exam to: 3.  show that she understood the way the United States works. After the reading, the discussion question also emphasizes English skills by asking, 4.  Why is it helpful for U.S. citizens to be able to read and write English? This glosses over the overly complex and racially unjust naturalization system for immigrants of color by naming the process as simply living in the US for five years, reading and writing in English, taking an exam, and seeing a judge. If this text were written from Lourdes’ point of view as a counternarrative, the reader would have heard of some of the obstacles immigrant women of color face gaining an education and becoming naturalized citizens in the USA. Furthermore, the assumption that it is an exam that demonstrates her understanding of America and not her lived experiences “others” immigrants. For those born in the USA, our lived experiences are enough to show our understanding of how America functions. But for immigrants like Lourdes, that is not enough. It normalizes the minimizing or discounting of the lived experiences of immigrants. The story could have remained accurate that she did have to take a test but named a more precise reason for it than “to show that she understood the way the United States works.” CRP says that we should push back against the apolitical education that seeks to only “present the facts.” While this narrative was factual in its simplicity, it strived to be apolitical and, in so doing, chose to ignore the voices and stories of many

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immigrants from Latin and South America in a story that should have represented them. Finally, while it makes sense to push learning to read and write in English within an English Language Learning textbook, the connection between acceptance as a “responsible citizen” and the use of the English language is incredibly ethnocentric and representative of soft linguistic discrimination, as more and more homes in the USA speak languages other than English, yet are no less responsible than households that communicate primarily in English. Flores and Rosa (2019) explained that the lionization of white elites for learning a second language while simultaneously problematizing that of racial minorities is just one way that raciolinguistic ideologies are manifested in curricula. For immigrants like Lourdes, learning English was problematized as an obstacle to her citizenship. This demonstrates the complex nature of racism in educational materials as noted by the tenets of CRP. Presenting the theme that learning English and passing a test makes one a responsible citizen also perpetuates a liberal myth of race neutrality. Here, all an immigrant woman of color must do is jump through a few extra hoops to prove herself responsible, and from there, she will be viewed as such by her peers in American society. Had the text allowed for counternarratives about the intersectionality of being a Latinx female immigrant, students might have seen more of themselves reflected in the text instead of an idealized reality. Corpus Linguistics Now that I have presented the prevailing theories and frameworks that underpin the critical discourse analysis used in the rest of the book, I will discuss a key computational tool. I rely on corpus tools to gather data during the description phase of CDA. Using these tools, I can organize the grammar and vocabulary of large data sets to isolate phenomena for analysis. One of the most frequently used tools for corpus analysis is a concordancer, which allows users to look at words in context. Corpus tools also enable users to collect frequency data, such as frequency lists of an isolated phenomenon. These two forms of data collection represent quantitative and qualitative analysis. In this text, I apply corpus-based linguistics to refine my understanding of the data in the description phase of CDA. Corpus-based language study uses a corpus to explore a theory or hypothesis (McEnery, Xiāo, and Tono, 2006). In this book, I will describe how I developed a corpus of textbooks following the recommendations of Lee and Collins (2015). They developed corpora for studying two series of books (12 total) of 27,000 and 29,000 words. Dr. Jackie Lee credits Carroll and Kowitz with promoting the use of computational software to study sex stereotyping in texts (Carroll and Kowitz, 1994). Dr. Lee has pioneered using computational software for linguistic analysis

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of ELT textbooks. Her studies in 2015 and 2018 relied on corpus analysis examination of a selection of gendered words to determine male/female predominance in the texts (Lee and Collins, 2015; Lee, 2018). In this book, I examine two series of six levels with one volume per level for 12 texts in the corpus. Benchmark Advance contains 44,757 words, and On Our Way to English comprises 18,039 words. Previous corpus studies have been criticized for their small size, which could restrict the conclusions drawn. Yang’s (2011) study used concordancing techniques like the methodology of the current study, examining collocations of he/she, man/ women/woman boy/s, and girl/s in a series of primary textbooks. Still, Yang’s analysis was limited by the small size of her corpus (14,340 words) and her collocation restriction. This study is based on a much larger corpus (63,000+ tokens) and includes a broader range of gender-concerned features than these previous studies. I employed ANTCONC as a computational tool for organizing and managing my data (Anthony, 2019). All the texts were entered electronically and then edited manually before collocational analyses were performed. I scanned each unit from each textbook into its own TXT file labeled for the series, book, and unit name. I then manually edited each TXT file for accuracy. To analyze gender representation in the series, the present study used frequency counts and collocational analysis. I first annotated the corpus for linguistic references to sex, then performed collocational and concordance analyses on these readings. Specifically, I annotated all gendered nouns, proper names, terms like “man/en,” “woman/ en,” “girl/s,” “boy/s”; and familial terms denoting sex such as “aunt,” “uncle,” “brother,” “sister,” “husband,” “wife,” “nephew,” “niece,” “son,” “daughter,” “mother,” “father,” “grandmother,” “grandfather”; and their derivatives, both in English and Spanish (such as “abuelo” and “abuela”). Next, I annotated all mentions of gendered pronouns: “he,” “him,” “she,” “her/s,” “his,” and their derivatives, such as versions ending in the suffix “-self.” I annotated linguistic stereotyped words, such as the suffixes “–man/en” and “-ess.” Then, I annotated address titles that refer to sex, such as “Mrs.,” “Ms.,” and “Mr.,” in addition to “Mister” and “Miss.” From these annotations, I then labeled collocated adjectives by sex. Next, I marked verbs collocated with “she” and “he,” as these are the most frequently occurring representations of male and female agents within the texts. I used the clusters tool to identify the verbs within five words to the left and right to determine the kinds of activities associated with males and females, following the example of Lee and Collins (2015). I additionally annotated the readings to denote genre and human or non-human. To analyze the frequency of sex visibility in the series, I used frequency counts and collocational analysis. The Word List tool was used to configure

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tokens versus types of words in each series. The Collocate tool examined the verbs associated with male and female agents. The Concordance tool elicited frequencies of individual words and phrases in a KWIC (Key Word in Context) format, which shows collocates of the word chosen and identifies common phrases. I ran select readings through Stanford’s Core NLP Parts of Speech (POS) Tagger to check my findings. I must note that since using Stanford’s Core for this stage of the process, I have discovered a POS tagger made by Dr. Anthony that I believe would have complemented my analyses in ANTCONC very well. I highly recommend both open-source programs. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I began by explaining the primary theories and methods I employ to analyze learning materials, followed by examples from my data set. I also gave a detailed explanation on how I gathered my data and prepared it for exploration in ANTCONC. In the next chapter, I will explain the queries I employed to interrogate the grammar and lexicon of the corpus to more fully understand what the corpus “says” about gender representation. I will use Fairclough’s questions during the description phase to analyze the results of my data collection. By collecting data on gendered humans and non-humans, I also collected information about ethnicity representation, which will also be explained in detail how corpus study of gender can reveal ethnic ideologies within the corpus. I will complete this next chapter by exploring themes of gender, ethnicity, and intersectionality regarding human characters in Fairclough’s second stage: interpretation.

Chapter 2

Human Character Analysis

In the introduction and previous chapter, I set up the background and rationale for this book, providing a background for the work that has been done in the US to create equality in teaching materials including ESL teaching materials. I further provided context for what is known about how ethnicity is represented in content-based teaching materials in mainstream classrooms and in children’s literature. In chapter one, I outlined the prevailing theories and frameworks that form the foundations of analysis for gender and ethnic representations in texts large and small. In this chapter, I will focus on applying those overarching theoretical frameworks to analyze human characters in my data set—12 English Language Learning textbooks adopted by California and Texas. What follows will be two stages of Fairclough’s Framework for CDA, employing as relevant additional frameworks, theories, and methods for literary and linguistic analysis which I will collectively call “tools.” PHASE ONE: DESCRIPTION The following features of the 12 texts were examined: 1.  The frequency with which women/men are mentioned or referred to through an analysis of the occurrences of masculine and feminine pronouns and nouns. 2.  The frequency of occurrences of various gender-marked terms. 3.  The kinds of adjectives collocating with woman/women, man/men, and boy/s and girl/s and the pronouns he and she. 4.  The kinds of verbs associated with males and females through an analysis of the pronouns he and she. 5.  The frequencies of various address titles for reference to women and men.

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Male and Female Appearances Table 2.1 contains the ten most frequently read gendered nouns for each series alongside how many tokens of each are found in the corpus. Female nouns made up 30.4% of the types of gendered nouns in the series On Our Way to English (OOWTE). Female nouns similarly made up 38.7% of the kinds of gendered nouns in Benchmark Advance. The ratio of male to female (m/f) gendered nouns for Benchmark Advance is 1.9: 1. For OOWTE the ratio of male to female is 1.99:1. As of 2010 (two years before OOWTE was published for Texas), the US Census recorded populations of males and females based on sex m=49.2% and f=50.8%. Therefore, these two series’ representations of gendered nouns are not representative of the nation (US Census Bureau, 2021). Table 2.1 also shows that the most frequent nouns are those that designate a person’s sex and family relationships. However, when paired nouns are compared, as in man/woman, mom/dad, and boy/girl, the male noun is found more frequently. Interestingly, the opposite is true for the nouns for marital status—husband/wife, and for parental nouns overall (mother/father, mommy/daddy). The top 10 most frequent female nouns are 40% familial terms. In Benchmark, females are most often referred to by these terms to show their relationship with a male protagonist who is named. One notable example is the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tales told from multiple perspectives. In each retelling, the two female characters, even when spoken to directly, are only referred to as “Jack’s Mother” and “The Giant’s Wife.” Other narratives feature females as narrators, but she remains unnamed, so they could not be included in this list. In this way, the female protagonist was disembodied because she was only a voice and was labeled by her role as a “narrator.” Table 2.1 Top Ten Gendered Nouns by Series Benchmark- Male

Benchmark- Female

OOWTE-Male

OOWTE-Female

man-68 Jack-40 Don-38 Edison-37 boy-36 king-36 men-35 Tesla-28 Washington-27 Midas-25 John-23

mother-38 woman-35 girl-26 mom-25 women-23 wife-22 queen-19 daughter-15 girls-15 Zora-15 hen-13

dad-70 Don-25 man-22 Frank-14 king-13 Miguel-13 Scott-13 Chay-12 Francois-12 Tom-12 brother-11

mom-51 Elena-36 Margaret-20 Dolley-15 Martha-14 Jasmin-11 mother-11 Carlota-8 Catalina-8 woman 8 Ana-7

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Here is an example from Benchmark Grade 4, unit 8 which demonstrates this phenomenon. 1.  “It was 5:13 am, and my husband had arisen and lit the gas stove and put on the water to heat . . . My husband told me to dress quickly and get down our stairs to the street.” Here, the man is given a name that describes his familial status and is given agency through his instructions to his family, which allows him a patriarchal respect role in the narrative. The narrator is disempowered in that she unquestioningly follows the commands of the male protagonist without taking any form of control. However, OOWTE has multiple extended readings that feature female named protagonists. Dolley and Martha are the lead protagonists in a play about the American Revolution, “The Declaration of Independence,” in Grade 5 unit 1. Though here, the names do not refer to the Founding Mothers but children, an odd choice for a contrived story written for this series given the chapters’ focus on the American Revolution. DISCUSSION Worldwide Comparisons It is of import to note that there have been no studies of ESL textbooks made for the USA teaching context since Porreca’s study in 1984, which I referenced in some detail in the introduction. Before hers, only one other study of US-focused ESL textbooks had been done—Hartman and Judd’s in 1978— also referenced in the introduction. However, much of the rest of the world has devoted space and time to analyzing its gender representation in language learning textbooks in the last ten to twenty years. For this reason, what follows is a comparison of this current analysis of these two widely read series in the US to current analyses of widely read textbooks in other ESL or EFL contexts globally, as there are no other US-based ESL studies of this kind to make a comparison. It is interesting to consider the ratios of male/female nouns from Benchmark in relation to Lee and Collins’ ratios for their Hong Kong EFL textbooks series published in 2014. They found an m/f ratio of .83: 1, and Lee’s Japan EFL textbook series study showed an m/f ratio of 1.62:1 and .62: 1, with m/f ratios in Benchmark reaching 1.9: 1. And for OOWTE at 1.99:1, this demonstrates a sex disparity between these examples from the East Asian EFL context and the USA context for publications of the same publishing

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period (2014–2018). Karen Porreca’s examination of gendered terms in U.S. ESL textbooks from 1984 showed similar findings to the present study: m/f of 2.1:1, which included using the masculine generic. Without it, the ratios were 1.77:1. Intersections with Ethnicity OOWTE demonstrates an impressive range of diversity in character allocation through its use of names from various cultures. Ana, Catalina, Carlota, Elena, and Jasmin are in this series’ top 10 most frequently named female nouns, denoting a consideration of the intended reader that Benchmark lacks. The only female name that makes the top 10 list is “Zora,” referring to one article in one unit of one book about Zora Neale Hurston. This contrasts the multiple male names that are part of the ten most frequent gendered nouns in Benchmark—Tesla, Midas, Washington, John, Edison, Don, and Jack. Tesla had three articles about him, and Edison, Washington, and King Midas were written about in multiple volumes of the series. Jack (and the Beanstalk) had an entire unit to itself, with four retellings of the fairytale from differing perspectives, followed by instructions on growing plants. Intersectionality In narratives, named characters are more likely to be protagonists, are more likely to receive deep descriptions, and are more likely to have agency and voice than characters who are unnamed (see Łajewska and Wróblewska, 2021 on tagging protagonists through named characters in corpus research). Critical Race Theory has been applied in educational settings historically through counter-storytelling. This practice is in response to the perceived lack of voice given to people of color in the classroom (Knaus, 2006). By examining the most frequent nouns in each series by sex first, I pinpoint the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity in the text regarding who is named. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in response to the Black feminist movement, highlighting issues of discrimination in Eurocentric societies at the intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, or ability (Crenshaw, 1991). By examining how often these people are named, I can determine the power these named characters have. Within the Benchmark text, written for Californian classrooms, the most frequently named characters for each sex demonstrate that males are more frequently named regardless of ethnicity. Secondly, this process highlights that it is more likely for a female to be named by her familial role than her name, regardless of ethnicity. OOWTE for the Texas classroom contains a different pattern.

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This text frequently names male and female characters and uses names that are part of the cultures of its readers, who are predominantly Latinx. Sociologists have demonstrated that the perception of Latinas in education as exotic, rare, and mystical insinuates unequal power structures at this intersection (Gutierrez, Gonzalez, and Seshadri, 2022). The second perception of Latinas in education is that they are passive and do not care about their education (Gloria, Castellanos, and Herrera, 2015). These harmful stereotypes create environments for these students that limits their voice in the classroom based on their multiple identities as Latina and female. By naming these characters appropriately and giving them a voice that is not contrived of SAE and endemic racism, but is instead authentic to their stories and uses translanguaging, harmful stereotypes that seek to silence Latinx girls in education demonstrate agency and voice in the text. In this next section, I observe how OOWTE makes attempts at providing authentic counternarratives from minority communities for their intended audiences through translanguaging, first person accounting, and naming conventions. Counternarratives OOWTE had more stories written from the first person perspective of people of color than Benchmark. These stories represent counternarratives and tell stories that are important for naming the lived experiences of the readers. For example, OOWTE Grade 4 contains a writing model of the personal narrative of a boy’s immigration story from his village in Mexico to Chicago. The story includes the Spanish word for father, demonstrating code meshing, a writing practice in which languages are purposefully integrated at the sentence level (Canagarajah, 2011). The story itself tells about packing the car and driving from Mexico to Chicago, so while it may represent a lived experience, it is not entirely representative of the experiences of immigrants from Mexico. In the same textbook is an interview with a new student from Vietnam named Quang. The interview asks for details about his immigration, the kinds of foods he ate at home and here, and what festivals and holidays he celebrates. There is a recipe for pho at the end of the interview and a picture of the Tet festival. These are examples of the Vietnamese language within the text. Later in the same book, readers encounter a story told by Miguel, a child living in the rainforests of South America, about walking with his grandfather to gather medicinal plants, which values the customs and traditions of children who, like Miguel, were raised to use herbal remedies and live from the land. While males tell most counternarratives, OOWTE does feature narratives by females of color. In Grade 4, “My Family Works the Land” is a personal narrative written by Vanessa, a child of migrant workers in the US. She uses mamá and papá to describe how her family moves with the crops and lives

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with other migrant families. In Grade 5, “My Two Homes” is told in first person from the perspective of Clara Diaz of Guatemala. The text uses these Spanish familial terms again and ends by addressing them as Guatemalan Americans. Comprehension questions ask the reader to recall details about life in Guatemala that Clara shared. This narrative is listed as an authentic retelling in first person. More of the details of this story will resonate with readers, as Clara’s mom works in a hotel and Clara’s dad builds houses. They moved in with their uncle and cousin upon arrival in the USA. This story represented Crenshaw’s meaning when she discussed Counternarratives (1991). It is communicated in first person. It discusses the struggles of immigrating to the USA, including everything written in English, the supermarkets being different from Guatemala, and living in a crowded home with extended family. The child describes her parents’ work—they must work in manual labor positions, which may be relatable to some immigrant children. Pronoun Study Following my first query for noun types and tokens, the present study also included an analysis of feminine and masculine pronouns, with results shown in Table 2.2. Through a frequency query of gendered pronouns (he/she, him/ her, his/hers, himself/herself)1,059 cases out of 1,497 total cases represented males with pronouns in Benchmark; the portion of females was 438. In OOWTE, 343 out of 552 total cases represented males with pronouns. The portion of females was 209. The results are like those of gendered nouns mentioned earlier, with an intense bias toward male representation. Benchmark had the most significant bias, with a pronoun m/f ratio of 2.4:1 (69%-29%). OOWTE had a m/f pronoun ratio of 1.6:1(62.2%-37.8%). Gender-Marked Words Words referring to occupations have been traditionally marked with the masculine generic. Marking is used often in sports as well as occupations, usually to denote the female equivalent, such as the NBA versus the WNBA. In contemporary society, gender-neutral terms are becoming increasingly common. Table 2.2 Pronoun Study Total Masculine

Masculine and Feminine Pronouns he Benchmark OOWTE

she him her

Total Feminine

his himself herself

570 237 118 195 348 224 130 24 79 94

23 1

6 0

1059; 69% 438; 29% 343; 62.2% 209; 37.8%

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Human Character Analysis

To compare the incidence of marked terms in the two sets of textbooks, I conducted a keyword search in ANTCONC for “man,” “men,” “mistress,” “master,” “boy,” and “girl,” removing the search term “word” so that all compound words ending with a masculine free morpheme—man/-men,— master[s],—boy[s], and a feminine morpheme—woman/women,—girl[s], and bound morpheme—ess[es] would be found. The findings for both series are summarized in Table 2.3. Table 2.3 clearly demonstrates that Benchmark uses occupational stereotyping while OOWTE rarely does. The only instance of masculine generic “man” in OOWTE was in a quote from astronaut John Glenn “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” A female child character talks about the “mailman” twice in a narrative. In Benchmark, there are 17 types of masculine-marked words and two types of feminine-marked words. “Master” and “mistress” are each used frequently at 19 tokens of the two types. These two words make up 52% of all marked words in Benchmark. Chapter four on the role of the genre will come back to these data to explore the probable role genre plays in gender-marked words in this series. Adjective Collocations in Gender-Referring Expressions I conducted a word study of the pronouns “he” and “she” as well as the phoneme “-man” to discover adjectives that commonly collocate with male and Table 2.3. Gender-Marked Words Vocabulary Businessman Mistress Master Salesman Tradesman Englishman Snowman Councilman Woodsman Nobleman Mankind Workmen Medicine men Lumbermen Mailman Minutemen Huntsman Sorceress Totals

Benchmark 2 5 14 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 36

OOWTE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 3

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female characters in both series. I first recorded all the adjectives for each pronoun and phoneme by series, then completed a keyword search for each word recorded in each series using KWIC views to study the words in their contexts before ascribing them to male or female characters in quantities. I ran KWIC views through Stanford’s CoreNLP for a sentiment analysis, and I labelled the adjective categories as seen in Figures 2.1-2.4 below. The results of this word study are in Figures 2.1-2.2 for Benchmark and Figures 2.3-2.4 for OOWTE. First, 75% of all adjectives retrieved through this word study collocated with males in Benchmark. So, while the types of adjectives used to describe males and females is shown in Figures 2.1-2.2, it is important to note that there were far more adjectives used to describe males overall than females. While males contained adjectives in all the type categories, females were not seen in the “number” category. This refers to a specific adjective “first.” Males were “first” 18 times in the series. In Benchmark, Figures 2.1-2.2 show that adjectives predominantly describe characters’ qualities and appearance.

Figure 2.1  Female Adjectives in Benchmark Source: Author

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Figure 2.2  Male Adjectives in Benchmark Source: Author

There are a wide variety of terms to define a male character’s stature, such as “gigantic,” “enormous,” “huge,” and “tall.” The terms for a female’s size are more limited and often refer to the lack of height—“little,” “small,” “tiny,” “fairy-like,” and short.” Androcentric terms concerning the appearance, such as “pretty” and “beautiful,” were exclusive to female agents. Lakoff labels these types of adjectives “empty” adjectives commonly used to describe women, and Talbot goes a step further to point out how these adjectives promote a female’s attractiveness to males (Lakoff, 1975; Talbot, 2010). 31% of adjectives allocated to females are physical descriptors. 22% of adjectives allocated to males are physical descriptors, suggesting greater concern for the physical appearance of female characters. The most common physical descriptor for males is adjectives for size—“enormous,” “large,” “giant,” “tall,” “gigantic,” and “long” are all used to describe how big a male agent is. Most physical description adjectives for female agents describe their beauty or lack thereof. “Beautiful,” “fairy-like,” “ugly,” “pretty,” “soft,” “bent,” and “cute” are all used to describe female characters. Beyond adjective types, I also collected tokens and overall sentiment. The largest token adjectives for males are “young” used 20 times, and “first” used

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Figure 2.3  Female Adjectives in OOWTE Source: Author

18 times. The largest token adjectives for females are “little”—14 times, and socioeconomic status—“poor” 8 times. When considering overall sentiments, both sexes are described with positive adjectives. Females were described positively 65.5% of the time, and males were described positively 72% of the time, suggesting that males were viewed more positively throughout the series than females. OOWTE had some similarities in adjective use, but the series has several unique properties in its use of adjectives to refer to gender. First, just as in Benchmark, males and females are described overall as positive based on adjective use. And, like Benchmark, males are described slightly more positively than females. 60% of adjectives used to describe female agents are positive. 68.5% of adjectives used to describe male agents are positive. 66% of all adjectives in this series collocate with males, meaning there are also more descriptions of males than females. The percentages in each category in Figures 2.3-2.4 should be viewed through this lens—that there were more frequent and more positive adjectives for male characters throughout the series.

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Figure 2.4  Male Adjectives in OOWTE Source: Author

Unlike Benchmark, OOWTE did not rely as heavily on physical appearance adjectives. Emotional states of being were seen at the same or higher rates, and qualities were the most frequently seen type for males and females. In this series, there was a persistent theme of overcoming adversity. Emotions played a more significant role than physical traits in overcoming obstacles. In OOWTE, the physical descriptions were similar to Benchmark in that male characters were most often described by their size, though with fewer terms. Males were still “big” and “strong,” “handsome” and “slick,” while females were still “tiny” and “small,” but not to the extent that is seen in Benchmark as shown in Figures 2.1-2.4. The adjectives to describe females were more spread out among the categories, with adjectives describing state of being receiving more frequent allocation, such as “happy,” “worried,” and “tired.” Lakoff’s early work on women’s language demonstrates that women are often stereotyped as more emotional than their male counterparts, and the data for OOWTE supports this stereotype (Lakoff, 1975).

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Verbs associated with Males and Females The clusters tool was employed to identify verbs collocating with the pronouns “she” and “he.” Results indicate that there are far more verbs collocating with males than females in both series. In Benchmark, 251 verbs collocate with “he,” and only 130 verbs collocate with “she” In OOWTE, 109 verbs collocate with “he,” and 81 verbs collocate with “she.” These are types of verbs instead of tokens, which insinuate greater flexibility in activity for male agents than for females. Additionally, as both agents collocate with all forms of the verb “be,” action verbs are more often collocated with male agents than females. Address Titles While the male address title, “Mr.” does not indicate marital status, the labels “Mrs.” and “Miss” do. First suggested in 1901 and made famous during the first wave feminist movement beginning in 1969, the term “Ms.” was introduced to create a symmetrical term to “Mr.” that does not refer to marital status (Zimmer, 2009). When examining both series for these terms, as referenced in Table 2.4, Benchmark uses both “Miss” and “Ms..” In contrast, OOWTE exclusively uses the more traditional titles “Miss”—15 and “Mrs.”—3 to address female characters, suggesting that it is yet to achieve current use. The title with the most frequent use in Benchmark is “Mr.” followed by “Mrs.” This is suggestive of a more traditional view of family in the series as Mrs. is a reference to married women. The instances with “Mrs.” are predominantly teachers and neighbors. These results are shown in Table 2.4 below. One way the “Mrs.” title functions in Benchmark is to diminish the female character. In “Mrs. Stowe and the President” in Benchmark Grade 5 unit 1, the title masks who “Mrs. Stowe” really is. In this case, Mrs. Stowe is Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Authors are often referred to by the name they use to pen their work. Using “Mrs.” instead of her full name hides what she is known for and puts her marital status as the first thing the reader understands about her. The short story’s title sounds more Table 2.4. Address Titles Address Miss Mrs. Mr. Ms. Totals

Benchmark

%

2 16 22 7 48

4.1% 33.3% 45.8% 14.5%

OOWTE 15 3 5 23

% 65.2% 13% 21.7% -

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like a housewife meeting the president, not an accomplished investigator and author. This is also seen in the narrative about Betsy Ross in book 2. She is referred to as “Mrs. Ross,” placing her marital status in the front and masking the name that many in the US would recognize immediately as the creator of the first American flag. Worldwide Comparisons Again, as the last study of this type within the US context was published in 1984, my comparisons are with published studies in ESL and EFL contexts outside the USA that analyzed textbooks printed around the same time as the current data set and that have been published within the last 10 years. In comparing the results of the pronoun study in this data set to the Hong Kong context, Lee and Collins found a ratio of male to female pronouns in the 2005 EFL series they examined at 1.28:1, and then in the 2014 revisions, the pronoun m/f ratio was found to have improved to 1.07:1. Bag and Bayurt conducted a content analysis of textbooks in the Turkish EFL context of 4th8th grades. Their findings of each textbook range between 42–58% female pronoun presence (Bag and Bayurt, 2015). The Turkish textbooks contrast more favorably than both US series, with only 29% and 37.8% female pronoun presence in Benchmark and OOWTE, respectively. Regarding marked words, also called linguistic stereotyping, while Benchmark contained 36 tokens, the Hong Kong EFL textbook series referenced earlier had but 3 in 2015. The 2018 study in the Japanese context also found fewer examples of this type of linguistic sexism, with gender-marked words ranging from 4 to 13 in a series (Lee, 2018). However, Lee’s Japanese EFL study demonstrated similar levels of diminutive and opaque adjectives for female characters to the current study. Males are most often described as young or old, and there is a wide variety of terms to define a male character’s stature, such as “gigantic,” “enormous,” “huge,” and “tall,” which is also seen in the Japanese EFL context (Lee, 2018). This demonstrates that linguistically, the US ESL context lags behind the Turkish, Japanese, and Hong Kong EFL contexts in certain areas, and these findings indicate a persistent imbalance and sex stereotyping, which was first brought up in the US context by Karen Porreca in 1984. However, Porreca’s study of US textbooks did not look at occupational linguistic stereotyping, so an examination of improvement in the US context cannot be drawn in that specific manner. There is an attempt at providing women with a broader range of activities through verbs than in Porreca’s work, such as the terms “invented” and “published,” which is an improvement from the 1984 US study. Porreca then noted that men were displayed at work five times as often as women with president being the most often referred to occupation

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for men. In contrast, women were most often shown to be maternal caregivers, or in diminutive positions such as receptionist. Her study found a m/f ratio of 2.94:1, which is most similar to Benchmark’s noun m/f ratio of 2.4:1. Thus men are still presented as more active and engaged in a broader range of activities, just as they are in much of the Asian contexts (Lee and Collins, 2014; Lee and Collins, 2015; Aljuaythin, 2018; Lee, 2018;). Phase Two: Interpretations Noun Analysis Interpretations Traditional Family Values are Important Traditional families with traditional gender roles begin quite early in the OOWTE series. The phonics readers used in the kindergarten textbook point to this theme. In unit 6, a traditionally dressed mother figure is seen scowling at her muddy child and pointing away. The words say, “Into the tub!” This begins the role of a mother being concerned about cleanliness, an aspect of domesticity. The nursery rhyme collected from The Nursery Rhymes of England by James Richard Halliwell featured in unit 10 of Benchmark Kindergarten is full of stereotypical gender roles for females (Halliwell, 1970). 2.  “‘There was an old woman tossed in a basket, for under her arms she carried a broom. “Whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?” “To sweep the cobwebs from the sky, And I’ll be back down again by-and-by.”’ I examined this nursery rhyme using Gee’s Significance Building Tool, which asks readers to look at how words and grammatical devices are used to build or diminish significance (Gee, 2011). She carries a broom and is preoccupied with clearing cobwebs from the sky—a trifling activity. Her age and sex are at the forefront of her description. She remains unnamed. The verbs used in this poem are also disconcerting. She is “tossed” in a basket. Small light objects are tossed. Using this verb to describe the action done to her dehumanizes her and removes her agency to place herself where she desires. Her response to the question about her return “by and by” adheres to a stereotype about women’s language as vague (Lakoff, 1975). Beyond this deconstructive analysis looms the question—what role should Eurocentric stories from the early 1800s play in ELL’s early literacy development? Responses could be to exclude obviously sexist stories from publication, while another response could be to provide students with context and methods for their own deconstructive analysis and critical discussion of themes. More on these strategies will be discussed in chapter five.

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OOWTE features a particularly stereotypical mother in Grade 2 unit 6. The narrative is told from the daughter’s perspective: 3.  ‘Mom went away this weekend. She put Dad in charge. “When I get back,” said Mom, “I want everything neat as a pin.” “OK,” said Dad.” The daughter’s language here tells of the assumed roles of mothers and fathers. Mom “put Dad in charge.” A quote from Mom explains what Dad is to oversee. These words lead to the assumption that dads are not in charge of the home; mothers are naturally in charge of the house, and a dad must be told when those roles are changed. This also assumes that only one parent can be in charge at a time instead of a more egalitarian sharing of the household duties. Traditional family roles are further explored when Dad shirks the responsibilities of the home Mom placed on him before she left. He falls asleep on the couch instead of cleaning. The theme that men are inept in the ways of the home is demonstrated in this story and follows what Sunderland found to be true of the rhetoric surrounding fathering in parenting magazines in 2000, that they are “mother’s bumbling assistant” (Sunderland, 2000). In this story the daughter then feels compelled to take over the domestic chores when she realizes her dad will not. This furthers the notion that daughters inherit domestic charge from their mothers. Thus, concerning stereotypes about family roles from the late 20th century are persisting in texts published in 2014. Intersections with Ethnicity While I have used the term “traditional” family values, I have assumed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) as the norm in this reference to tradition. In both series, whether characters are white or part of an ethnic minority, they are depicted as part of a two-parent heterosexual home. The language used for each family story is overwhelmingly English only. In Benchmark, characters are only known as people of color based on their illustrations. Their names are European in origin, and as seen in the adjectives study, very few adjectives are used to describe a character’s ethnicity regardless of sex or series. However, there are 12 uses of “African American” and 7 uses of “American” within the two corpora, suggesting that when ethnicity is described, it is with a Western mindset. Through European naming conventions, lack of ethnic descriptions and behaviors that are dominant in Western homes communicate to the reader that there are narrow ways of being, speaking, and participating in family life. Lack of consideration for how marginalized communities would refer to themselves, describe themselves and use a global English or home

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language to accomplish goals expresses their lack of value in the text, which, coupled with illustrations of black and brown people dressed in 1940s-1950s Caucasian American clothing, miscommunicates a homogeneity also known as the liberal myth of colorblindness from CRT. Traditional family values for cultures other than dominant white Americans are missing from the Benchmark series. This series has few references to home language use, and there are no families of color that explore non-dominant ways of being within family structures. However, in OOWTE, multiple stories about immigrant families teach readers about diverse families and family life. Stories of immigrants from Guatemala, China, and Vietnam are shared in this series in first person narrative format. Readers also learn about the lived experiences of migrant families in the first person. These stories provide more opportunities for the intended readers to see themselves in the text, whereas Benchmark’s use of only dominant cultural ways of being does not. Interpretations of Verb Analysis Women’s Accomplishments Minimized/ Men’s Accomplishments Maximized Using qualitative analysis methods, I cataloged the themes that represented gender through the realizations of each story. Then, I created a marking system to denote the depth or prevalence of each theme in the readings. When stories diminish a female character’s voice or accomplishments, the most common way this was realized is through the verbs used to describe her actions. When a story uses hesitant language and/or places the actions of a female onto an object or idea, I marked its prevalence as low—the diminishing power of the text is subtle, not overt. Thompson calls this “thingifying,” in which the writer turns actions into things or states of affairs (Thompson, 1990). There are several examples of this type of language in Benchmark Grade 5 when referring to the Lowell Mills Girls featured in several readings within the unit. The first reading, “A Mill Picture,” was originally by Marshal Putnam Thompson (1893) but adapted for this series writes, 4.  the belts and twisted gearing make a network in the rooms. The action verb is given to the belts and gearing, not to the woman controlling them. I looked throughout the poem for verbs collocated with the Lowell Mill girls; the verbs attributed to them are “think of fair Killarney” and “dream some old love tune.” The woman in this poem has no action verbs attributed to her at all. The poem’s last line lets the reader know that this poem is told from the perspective of her male superintendent.

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5.  So, the superintendent wonders, as he sees her through the looms. Thus, despite the topic of this section of the text being about the Lowell Mill girls, the reader must learn about them through the male gaze, a term popularized in feminist theory to describe the way the female person is represented and depicted in literature and film through male eyes, with a focus on objectification. The use of these verbs alluding to a girl daydreaming about her task are contradictory to the truth of factory work during the Industrial Revolution, as evidenced in a poem by Rudyard Kipling where he personifies the machines by writing, 6.  “If you make a slip in handling us, you die!” This poem is within the same unit as the Putnam poem, but paints a different picture of how the machinist comes at their work. I marked stories with a different symbol to denote when the theme represented was overt, such as by misrepresenting the female character in a biography or when a male character outwardly demeans the work of the female. In Benchmark Grade 2 unit 1, the first story deeply diminishes the accomplishments of Betsy Ross. The story is the often-recounted legend of how Betsy Ross designed and sewed the first American flag. However, this legend has been debunked as part of the grand narrative of our national history that has worked to hide the accomplishments of some (Martin and Nakayama, 2018). Betsy Ross did, however, accept commissions for flags for the US Navy. Her role in both the first American flag and those for the Navy may have been more of a managerial position than a seamstress, as she was the owner of the shop Washington reportedly visited the night he commissioned Ross’ business for the creation of the flag (History of Betsy Ross). The story misrepresents Ross by leaving out details that would have more accurately described her role in our nation’s history. The action words used for Ross include “Took a break from her sewing” and “Mrs. Ross folded and cut long into the night.” This debunked narrative diminishes her role as a shop owner and manager. Intersections with Ethnicity Along with the inclusion of Marshall Putnam’s poem about female Irish immigrants in Lowell Mill is the stereotype of immigrants as undependable, flighty, or lazy. This poem, spoken from the white male gaze, communicates the white male belief that immigrants must be watched in the workplace. The publishers could have chosen to illustrate the lived experiences of the Lowell Mill Girls by highlighting their work ethic, the economic freedom they gained through employment, or the protests they organized for better working

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conditions. There are multiple narratives from this period written by female immigrants that could have been used to portray female immigrant workers more accurately at Lowell Mills. One example that could have resonated with the intended reader would have been to describe Mother Jones. As a female Irish immigrant in the mills in Pennsylvania, she fought for child labor laws to be passed (Winter and Carpenter, 2020). Her story could have provided a counternarrative to that of Putnam’s poem told from the perspective of the white male superintendent. Putnam’s poem in Benchmark is also harmful as it creates conditions for something called stereotype threat, which is the discomfort marginalized people feel when they are confronted by a negative stereotype about a group with which they identify in a situation where that stereotype could potentially be confirmed. By placing a poem that paints a picture of the daydreaming female immigrant watched by her US male supervisor at work, female immigrants could feel discomfort at seeing this negative stereotype during class time when they are assessed by their US teachers. The stress response caused by stereotype threat has been shown to lower cognitive processing during complex tasks. Performing academically in one’s second language would qualify as a complex task that could be inhibited by studying poems like this in class (Weber, Appel, and Kronberger, 2015). Another issue brought out from the noun word study and subsequent close readings is called linguistic suppression. This is a phenomenon where agency is hidden through language. This is oftentimes done through passive voice, which makes ambiguous the doer of the action. This can also take place through personification, where an inanimate object acts in place of a living being. The result of this personification is that the actions of the person are hidden. This can also happen when there is no reference to the doer, but the actions are included. This is typically achieved through passive agent deletion or nominalization. Linguistic backgrounding is similar to linguistic suppression but contains slight differences. This happens when the doer of the action is still present in the text, but their agency is implied or must be assumed because of word choice. It is possible to infer which actions have been committed by which social actor. Here the exclusion is not total, but the emphasis is removed from the agent, pushing the agent into the background (Tranchese and Zollo, 2013). Women of color have experienced suppression or exclusion of their achievements and their voices within these series. For example, Sacagawea is discussed in both Benchmark and OOWTE. In Benchmark, there is a picture of her with her name written in a language use activity on proper nouns. Martin Luther King Jr, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln are alongside her. However, she is never written about in this textbook.

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In OOWTE, a journal entry called “The Nez Perce Help Us!” is written by William Clark and references Sacagawea as their guide, who has helped them talk with Indigenous peoples. He says that while she knows many languages, she cannot communicate with the Nez Perce. So, in two textbooks, she is named, but her accomplishments are non-existent or minimized. While the OOWTE text does name her role as guide and hedges her shortcomings with her linguistic knowledge, it also emphasizes her flaws in translating for them, diminishing her accomplishments to this point in multilingualism and translation while also wholly dodging the reasons why she was a polyglot or why she was accompanying them—human trafficking and slavery (Vettel-Becker, 2009). Additionally, her story is told from Clark’s perspective, reflecting the white male perspective on the indigenous female protagonist, which the author used to minimize her value and eliminate her agency. Counternarratives told by Indigenous peoples should have been employed and would have positioned her more accurately and given her a more excellent voice in her own story. Framing her story through the lens of white colonizers perpetuates a white supremacist ideology. Women’s stories being told from men’s perspectives is common in these texts. For example, the only time readers learn about Harriet Tubman is through the journal entry of a young boy who describes how she led him and his family to safety. Women of color’s accomplishments were also dim compared to the amount of space given within these series to men and men of color. For example, in Benchmark Grade 5, readers learn about the Dred Scott Decision in 12 paragraphs and a grammar exercise on past and past perfect; they read about Thurgood Marshall’s Liberty Medal Acceptance Speech in 12 sections and a grammar activity on combining sentences. There is a reading about Wong Ming-Chung, a Chinese Miner, in a first person journal entry in 8 paragraphs and a comprehension activity. However, only two readings exist in this book about women of color. There is a four-paragraph word study reading on Zora Neale Hurston. One question asks students to compare this biography to a fiction story that features a character Hurston wrote about. The other is an extended reading about Marie M. Daly, where she is not mentioned after paragraph four in the 12-paragraph reading. The grammar activity that comes next does not reference Daly either. So, while it is important to note that women of color are discussed alongside their accomplishments, they are given significantly less space in the text to do so, especially compared to men and men of color. There are entire units where no women of color are present. In unit 7 of Benchmark Kindergarten, an entire unit on holidays and celebrations does not reference a single woman, much less a woman of color. However, children are introduced to Martin Luther King Jr. Day as part of a reading called

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“People We Celebrate.” He is the only person of color named in the chapter. The selection of an all-male, almost entirely white unit on people celebrated for their work or heroism dilutes the rich history of BIPOC and women’s contributions to the fabric of the USA and communicates to a vulnerable population that only dominant culture work is celebrated. This perpetuates a white supremacist ideology while upholding the liberal myth of meritocracy. Work is celebrated, sending the idea that challenging work is valued. Still, it is only celebrated by white people, sending mixed messages about whether people of color are not contributing, or their work is not valuable. The unit on US holidays misses the experiential value that voices of color bring to the text as legitimate authoritative sources for American history and rich cultures and celebrations. Men Go Out and Have Adventures/ Women Stay Home and Wait A persistent pattern regarding actions by sex within the text involves the notion that male characters go out and have adventures while female characters stay home or go home, echoing the findings of Evans and Davies in middle school English Language Arts textbooks in public schools in the USA. They reported that males were more adventurous and took more significant risks than females (Evans and Davies, 2000). More than 160 short stories and articles were read in-depth for this issue, and 98 of them contained this theme, making it the most prevalent gendered theme in the Benchmark series. This issue is just as commonplace in OOWTE, with 39 out of over 70 stories in the OOWTE series containing this issue to some degree. With this theme, it was impossible to separate gender from ethnicity. Thus, this section will discuss intersectionality only. Because this theme was so pervasive, I tried to denote the degrees in the following ways. First, a male goes out on an adventure, OR a female is pictured at home, but the story is not focused on the act of adventuring or staying home. An example of this is the poem “Si Se Puede!” About Cesar Chavez in Benchmark Grade 4 unit 9. The poem focuses on how Chavez went to the fields and rallied on behalf of migrant workers. He goes out but focuses on his promoted change, not on an adventure. A second degree was noted when the story focuses on a male going out to have an adventure OR the story’s focus is on a female staying home. “Cinderella’s Very Bad Day” and “Cinderella: Too Much for Words” in Benchmark Grade 3 unit 4 are examples of how a story is focused on females staying home. The setting is in the kitchen and bedrooms of the family home. All actions are related to domestic service. We also see this theme in stories with female protagonists of color. In an excerpt from Esperanza Rising, the

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scene takes place in the kitchen. The sisters and mother are upset at their brother for losing his job. Thus, the story happens at home and is about a male character going out. In two short readings in OOWTE, “My Two Homes” and “My Family Works the Land,” the female narrator describes her family’s work. She does not act at all during either reporting. Instead, she reports on the parents’ work. Next in degree are male-centered, male-only stories. There are five Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill folktales in Benchmark. Each of these stories is an example of a male-centered story—no female presence—and the focus is on the adventures these men go out and have. Their experiences had a direct physical impact on the landscape of the USA. Paul Bunyan got rid of mosquitos for a summer (Grade 4 unit 6), killed all the oak trees in Iowa (Grade 5, unit 3), and created rivers in the Midwest (Grade 3 unit 2). Pecos Bill made Death Valley (Grade 5 unit 8). We do see the first US folktale featuring a person of color. John Henry is written about in Grade 4 as well. So, while men of color can go out on adventures, it is not to the extent of white men. Finally are stories where both elements are present—a male is out on an adventure while a female character goes home or stays home. For example, in OOWTE Grade 4 unit 6, “Our Rainforest Home,” is a story written about an indigenous family in Costa Rica. There are two females and two males. The daughter is sick in bed. The mother sends her son to his grandfather to collect medicine from the rainforest. The rest of the story is about the son and grandfather venturing through the rainforest together. The mother plays no role beyond sending the son for help. And the daughter plays no part beyond invalid. However, the son and grandfather tromp through the rainforest and then save the female in the end. This theme is present in dominant and non-dominant culture stories making it difficult to separate gender and ethnicity. Women of color are at the intersection—they are seen less frequently. They are given less voice and initiative than any other character type, such as in the Costa Rican mother and daughter example above. Females are Cooperative/Males are Competitive Both series contain multiple readings about the cooperative nature of females. This is sometimes contrasted with the competitive nature of males in the same text, but not always. When comparing the two series, 16 of the 70 stories analyzed contain a competitive male and/or cooperative female in OOWTE. 36 articles of the 160 readings in Benchmark include this theme, showing that it is prevalent at the same rate as in OOWTE (22%). Many of the articles that contain this theme are in the Benchmark Grade 5 textbook, which focuses on

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the wars the USA has fought and so results in males participating in competitions of sorts. There are also many texts outlining the competitive nature of male characters. And while there are a few examples of competitive females, there are no examples of males who are cooperative in either series. These themes were also present in the 2000 study of middle school readers in the US, where they found that 33% of male characters were competitive versus only 11% of females (Evans and Davies, 2000). Lessons about male and female socialization rules appear early in the Benchmark series. In the first unit of the kindergarten text, a female child befriends a lonely male child, suggesting an air of cooperativeness placed on females in American society. Evans and Davies also found females to be more nurturing, passive, and understanding than males in their study of American textbooks (Evans and Davies, 2000). Deborah Tannen has written at length about the social conditioning of females to engage in cooperative talk and play. At the same time, males are socially conditioned to engage in information-giving and one-upmanship (Tannen, 1990). This social conditioning into gender roles in the school environment appears to be firmly perpetuated in both series of texts and at every level. Additionally, there is evidence of the competitive nature of males. In OOWTE, this begins quite early, with two stories about baseball that are male-only, promoting the competitive sport to boys in kindergarten. The continuation of male-only competitive sports happens again in OOWTE Grade 1 with “Ivan Finds His Place,” where his sister plays violin, and he finds a place on the ball field. There are two stories in the OOWTE series where this theme is fully realized in the same story—females show cooperativeness while males show competitiveness. In OOWTE Kindergarten, “Bake Sale” contains a boy who demeans a girl for a cake she made for the bake sale, telling her that he could make a better cake. This is a competitive nature. In the end, his cake looks awful, and the female shares her cake with him. This is the cooperative nature. A second theme that shows up here is that females dominate only domestic endeavors such as baking, which comes from post-Industrial Revolution Patriarchy (Du Mez, 2020). Intersections with Ethnicity While stories of people of color are fewer than those of European descent, multiple examples demonstrate women’s cooperative nature within their accounts. For instance, in a reading about Dolores Huerta in Benchmark Grade 4, the emphasis on Huerta’s work culminates in her partnership with Cesar Chavez in creating The National Farm Workers Association. From this

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point forward, the text uses thirdperson plural “them” and “they,” showing how cooperation gave them a greater voice in the fight for equality. In another story in Grade 2, warring Indigenous Nations cannot work out who will get water rights—competitive nature—so the chief brings in his daughter to help make peace. She encourages them all to share—cooperative nature (“Let the Water Flow”). This is one story that I, unfortunately, could not find another recounting. It is possible that this adaptation has been altered to the point that it no longer resembles its indigenous oral histories, or it is possible that an author created this folk tale to mimic indigenous folklore. If this story has been altered beyond recognition, it denotes a disregard for the oral histories of First Nations peoples. If an author decided to mimic the genre of First Nations folk literature, giving characters indigenous-sounding names and describing Indigenous peoples as “warring,” then the authors communicate an ethnocentric ideology that allows them to “play Indian” with the bits and pieces of Indigenous culture and language (Hirschfelder and Molin, 2018). John Henryism John Henry is an excellent example of a competitive man of color. In one of his tall tales in Benchmark Grade 4, he goes head-to-head against a manufactured machine to see who could work faster. What is missing from this version of Henry’s tall tale is that he died with a hammer in his hand. This textbook version pushes the narrative that men who work hard, compete and win, get ahead, and are revered. This is again part of the liberal myth of meritocracy exposed within Critical Race Theory. Sherman James, the creator of the John Henryism Theory, explains that African Americans have worked for decades and generations against an unjust machine of a social system in efforts to raise themselves out of poverty. This has led to cardiovascular damage, which leads to high blood pressure and stroke, which is higher among African Americans than whites in the USA. The theory is based on the original John Henry tale, including his death (James, 1994). This kind of work could and did lead to land ownership, family, and wealth for white men, including white immigrants. But, by leaving out the ending of the original tall tale—his death—the textbook fails to address that for Black men, striving to get ahead in an unequal society led to stress that was so corrosive as to age men like Henry much faster than any other demographic in the USA. While this is a children’s text, a short non-fiction piece after Henry’s story that provided some historical explanation about laws concerning citizenship and landownership that extended to white men, then white immigrants, before being extended to black men could have positively added to the narrative.

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CONCLUSION This chapter served to demonstrate the use of corpus linguistics to examine a large chunk of language to tease out themes with which to interrogate during the various stages of CDA. This chapter also explored how the work of intersectionality from Critical Race Theory is integral to studying gender and ethnicity through direct interrogation of the corpus. In the next chapter, I will focus on how to examine a corpus that contains language from and about non-humans using these theories and methods. I will stretch CRT to encompass gendered language and language about non-humans from various ethnic contexts. Chapter three will include additional ways to engage the ideas from this chapter to push the field of critical discourse analysis forward through intersectionality in non-human stories.

Chapter 3

Non-human Character Analysis

INTRODUCTION Children’s literature and English language learning textbooks have historically limited the potential of female agents (Blumberg, 2015). Chapter two of this text demonstrated how authors weakened the contributions and agency of females and people of color, such as through backgrounding and the use of liberal myths of white supremacy, meritocracy, and linguistic suppression. However, most historical studies have ignored the roles of non-human characters in offering potential opportunities for male and female agents as readers (Sunderland, 2015). Often, non-humans are explicitly removed from analysis in language learning materials, despite their prevalence and importance in childhood learning. As many language learning texts adapt full-length picture books for use in language learning, we must understand what these fantastical characters are communicating to young language learners acquiring language, literacy, and social norms simultaneously from these texts (Harro, 2000). For a summary of research into how non-humans have been studied in children’s fiction, please see Burden, 2021. This chapter will follow a similar format as chapter two initially before also answering: what differences exist between how humans and non-humans represent gender and ethnicity discursively? Beyond a side-by-side reader-led comparison of chapters two and three, the last section will clarify discursive similarities and differences between humans and non-humans in the two series. Examples of stories containing both types of characters will be contrasted alongside human-only and non-human-only readings. The purpose of this will be to explore the implications of reading gender and ethnicity when characters are fantastical vs. the reflective possibilities in human characters on young learners of these texts. 45

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STEP ONE: DESCRIPTION I completed the exact same queries on the corpora as I explained in detail in chapter two, focusing on the language of and about non-human characters separately. In addition to those queries, I catalogued the frequency of occurrences, sex, and non-human form of characters (Ex: robot, mythical dwarf) as well as short descriptions, linguistic references, and page numbers for each occurrence. I then compiled a table to demonstrate the linguistic gendering of non-human characters by both series in Table 3.1 The numbers in Table 3.1 refer to the number of character types that were determined to be anthropomorphized male or female in each series. The third category “non-gendered” are character types that had no linguistic markings that referred explicitly to the character’s sex. This only occurred in Benchmark and represents only 2.5% of non-human characters in the series. Linguistic gendering in these texts was determined using pronouns. Sometimes, the characters’ names insinuated sex as did my member resources, such as with the fairy Tinkerbell in a Peter Pan retelling in Benchmark Advance for which I had background knowledge. However, I did not rely on proper names for linguistic gendering but instead looked for pronouns to confirm sex of characters. As could be expected from previous analysis of human characters through first noun and then pronoun studies, male non-human characters are seen in two of every three instances of non-humans in both series. Benchmark had far more stories and poems about animals and other non-human characters than OOWTE, which featured human stories. The ratio of male to female non-human characters is high in Benchmark at 3.14:1. OOWTE had fewer non-human characters but a similar ratio of 3:1 male to female. There are characters in each series that are only male, such as dogs and badgers. Type vs. Token There are not simply more tokens of male non-humans but also more types. There are 47 types of male non-human characters in Benchmark Advance and 11 types in OOWTE which contrasts with the five female types in OOWTE

Table 3.1 Gendered Non-Human Characters Gender Male Female Non-gendered

Benchmark 88 28 3

% 73.9% 23.5% 2.5%

OOWTE 15 5 -

% 75% 25% -

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and the 23 female types in Benchmark. The ratio of male to female types is 2:1 in both Benchmark and OOWTE. Adjective Study Following a look at non-human nouns, I conducted a pronoun study of non-human characters in ANTCONC, to analyze adjectives collocating closely with non-humans. Non-human females, such as ladybugs, snails, beans, beetles, ants, birds, and fairies, are described frequently as small. There are several characters where the gendering and descriptor are appropriate such as the adjective “little” is used in every instance where a hen is a character. Since size adjectives were quite common for non-humans, I decided to consider in more depth the commonalities and differences in how size adjectives contribute to male and female non-human representation. In each instance where a male was characterized as small, these petite males accomplished something huge, using their size to their advantage. Mosquito is blamed for a never-ending night in an African folktale (Benchmark Grade 1 unit 6). Gnat boasts about taking down the King of Beasts (a lion) (Benchmark Grade 4 unit 2). There are far fewer examples of female nonhuman characters in OOWTE, so it is difficult to notice patterns. However, female characters are characterized as being slow compared to their faster male characters. An example is Kate the Country Mouse in “City Mouse Country Mouse” (Benchmark Grade 1), where Kate’s slow, quiet life is too dull for Clyde, the City Mouse. Kate does not appreciate the fast pace of city life and returns home, calmed by the quiet countryside. An interesting note about this story is that while it is a well-known children’s tale, it is not always a male and a female mouse. The authors chose to make the slow country mouse female, a change from previous retellings. When the female characters can accomplish something, this often surprises the male characters, as in “Tortoise and the Hare” (Benchmark Kindergarten), “How the Beetle Got Her Coat” (Benchmark Grade 2), and “How Water Came to Dry Lands” (OOWTE Grade 4). In each of these stories, the female is described in ways emphasizing her slowness. Tortoise is described as: 1.  . . . plodded along, slowly putting one foot in front of the other as tortoises do. “I may be slow,” said Tortoise, “but I always try hard to do my best.” This is the second example of a story that has not always been gendered, but the authors chose to use female pronouns for the tortoise and male pronouns for the hare. The Beetle has this description:

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2.  “The beetle crawls so slowly.” he thought. “She can’t possibly win!” Snail is given adverbs and adjectives to describe the intensity of her slowness: 3.  Snail was small and slow[. . .] The people watched as Snail went slowly to the ocean. Some shook their heads and said, “She’s so small, and the bottle is so big!”[. . .] When Snail finally returned, everyone was asleep. Slowly, the exhausted Snail climbed the hill to her home. In each of these tales, the female must overcome the obstacle of slowness with another characteristic she possesses. The Tortoise and the Snail are both determined. The Beetle can fly. This sits in contrast to male non-humans who are also small, like gnats, mosquitoes, and crawfish in the same types of stories—fables and folklore—where their size is an advantage to use to accomplish big things, vs. petite females who are also slow and must overcome their physical size and slowness with character. A second pattern from the pronoun and adjective collocation study was that the female characters are often characterized as less intelligent than male characters, as in Aesop’s “Fox and Crow,” where the male fox flatters the crow through compliments of her beauty, so she will sing for him, dropping her cheese to do so. He then pokes fun at her dim intelligence before taking the cheese and running away— 4.  Between bites of the cheese, the grinning fox said, “You have a voice, madam, I see, but what you want is wits.” (Benchmark Kindergarten). One of the female cows in Benchmark Grade 1 is part of a poem about a farmer boy. What the reader learns about the Jersey Cow is that “she knew not how” to thank the farmer boy for getting her home. Fox is a frequent non-human character in each series, and he is clever and cunning each time. Male characters are frequently described by some positive character traits such as clever, cunning, intelligent, and crafty, as in “Crafty Fox” (Benchmark Grade 1 unit 4 and Grade 3 unit 6), “Clever Raven” (Benchmark Grade 5 unit 8), “Wise Friend Fox” (Benchmark Grade 2 unit 6). This suggests a pattern among non-human characters that equates masculinity with agility, accomplishment, and intelligence while equating femininity with dim wit, slowness, and small stature. Worldwide Comparisons While most content and linguistic studies of textbooks exclusively examine human characters, there are a few studies that took the challenge to apply

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CDA and content analyses to non-humans as well. There are no such studies for ESL textbooks written for the US context. Thus, comparisons in this section will only be from outside the USA. This pattern of male accomplishment and female domesticity is also seen in earlier studies of non-humans in English language learning texts, such as Bhattacharya’s study in 2017 of a series of literacy texts in India. She explained that the use of metaphors positioned male non-human characters as powerful, strong, and aggressive. In an analysis of early-literacy textbooks in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, researchers claim that animals and insects were humanized to promote ideologies of ethnicized and gendered moral education (Chankseliani, Silova, Palandjian, Mun, and Zholdoshalieva, 2018). Unfortunately, this is the extent of what is known about non-humans linguistically in ESL/EFL textbooks to date. Thus, this work adds to the emerging conversation and calls for more research. STEP TWO: INTERPRETATION Male Exceptionalism Male non-humans are more frequent in type and token, are more often large, and are described for their character traits that demonstrate strength and intelligence. Female non-humans are less frequent in both series and are more often small and slow, characterized by their size, small intellect, and slow speed. Their size is more often an obstacle to overcome than a trait used to their advantage. Adjectives that consistently place male non-humans as intelligent by nature continue the stereotype that masculinity includes intelligence and promotes a dangerous binary that “others” females or discourages female readers from pursuing traditionally male enterprises. The term “othering” refers to how power is granted when discourses present the dominant forms as the default and other more diverse forms as “other” (Talbot, 2010). Demeaning female characters through adjectives of diminutive size and intellect is part of a traditional male supremacist ideology linking masculinity with achievement and femininity with physical appearance. In each example above, the appearance of the female had to be overcome to achieve. Whereas the male appearance was not questioned but instead was assumed normative. Secondly, Tortoise, Beetle, and Snail all verbally agreed to complete the physical challenges they undertook but were questioned and undermined through descriptions that depicted them as incapable despite what they claimed to be able to do. This is an unfortunate and pervasive issue in the United States called “mansplaining” by popular culture, in which a woman’s voice is ignored in favor of a male who takes over, explaining, typically to a female in a condescending or patronizing manner, something she already

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understands (Conner, McCauliff, Shue, and Stamp, 2018). These examples qualify as “mansplaining” as the female voices are ignored. Male voices explain to them using demeaning language why their size—as if they did not already comprehend their size—would limit their ability to complete the tasks they have agreed to. Ignoring the voices of female agents and instead focusing on their physical or perceived mental flaws has damaging effects on society, as evidenced by recent studies demonstrating that children as early as age six have taken up the stereotype that boys are more intelligent than girls and defer to them in classroom situations (Bian, Leslie, and Cimpian, 2017). These non-human characters perpetuate sex stereotypes that females are the weaker, fairer sex and less intelligent than males. Stereotypes concerning males as stronger, larger, and more intelligent are emphasized in most non-human stories. This trope promotes consumeristic ideologies of male and female worth based on physical features. Magazines often push airbrushed versions of super-sized males and wafer-thin females onto consumers as “real” beauty, thus encouraging the sales of products that promise this beauty to the consumer (Talbot, 2010). Females who appear helpless and need rescue are a familiar trope of femininity. These descriptions of masculine and feminine non-humans act similarly, emphasizing an unhealthy support of male and female physique and behavior. As the U.S. is a highly consumeristic society, the ideologies highlighted by these non-humans align with the priorities of the capitalist government in which the texts are created. Males Go Out/Females Stay Home Multiple verb examples demonstrate the adventurous nature of males, which is often contrasted by the quieter, more complacent nature of females. Benchmark contains multiple examples. From a male dog following his owner to school, pigs leaving home to build their own homes to Millie, the female goat happily waiting for the children to come to her pasture to play, male characters leave and have adventures and females stay home, or go home and wait. The female Country Mouse is content to stay home; in contrast, her male city cousin lives an adventurous life. Mother Fox waits patiently at home for her son to go to the Hen’s coop and grab her for dinner. There were 36 readings featuring a male non-human going out, a female non-human staying home, or both out of 64 non-human tales which constructs females as inactive and peripheral with less agency than males. More verbs overall and more concrete action verbs collocated with males than females. Verbs that are more descriptive and more frequent for males, while keeping female action within the home and related to domesticity, push the ideology of gender essentialism, a worldview present in Post-Industrial Revolution America and proliferated in the American Evangelical church.

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Famous Christian authors such as Nancy Lee DeMoss, John Piper, and Wayne Grudem tout this as Biblical and therefore rational, normalizing this ideology in Christian fundamentalist and complementarian families. DeMoss ironically describes this ideology in her book Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free, where she claims that God wired men to be providers and protectors and they are therefore not well suited to childcare and homemaking, but that God wired women for nurturing and emotional support, making them perfect for childcare and homemaking (Wolgemuth, 2018). These ideologies have kept women underemployed and underpaid since the Industrial Revolution and are used to rationalize discrimination and the gender pay gap. These values are present through verb choices. Intersections with Ethnicity When examining the ethnic origins of these non-human tales, it became apparent that both series relied heavily on White European animal stories, folktales, fairy tales, and fables. For example, seven of Grimm’s Fairytales were included, with other European versions, such as the Russian Snow White. Beyond Grimm, the 12 textbooks featured nine other European folk, fable, or fairytales. The Greek storyteller Aesop accounted for 15 non-human stories in the 12 textbooks, with an additional four Greek myths. There were excerpts from multiple novels that contained non-human characters, all written by white Americans or Europeans, none of which featured any culture other than white American or white European. Only 20 non-human stories—or stories containing non-human characters—originated from people of color ranging from Asian to South American to African to Indigenous North American. Of those 20, two had no words but were only images for students to put in order as an exercise in storytelling. Another three removed the sex of the non-human character, so corpus analysis of gendered words left out their stories. Overreliance on White Knowledge There were 44 fables, folk, or fairytales with non-human gendered characters in the 12 textbooks made by and/or about Eurocentric characters. With only 20 about non-white ethnicities, two of which contained no words, and another three of which removed the sex of the non-human character, the apparent overreliance on white ways of knowing and white narratives is an example of the first tenet of Critical Race Theory—that racism is so ingrained in daily practices and social and cultural interaction as to go unnoticed. Guerrettaz and Zahler name this epistemological racism, concerned with legitimizing knowledge as both linguistic and cultural within literacy textbooks in the

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ESL classroom. In these 12 books, the presentation of white experiences as primarily representative of the multiple genres demonstrates how racism is deeply woven into educational curricula (Guerrettaz and Zahler, 2017). Using Gee’s “Why This Way and Not That Way” tool to analyze how characters are named, I saw a prevalence of foxes and crows. When using the Why This Way and Not That Way Tool, analysts ask why something was said the way it was and how it could have been said differently, looking at the grammar as a point of exploration. Three stories featured crows in the title and five featured foxes in the title. Animals play a significant role in Native American tales, where these animals serve as main characters and play essential functions in messaging. Ravens and Crows are some of the most common subjects in Native American folklore, often used interchangeably, and represent magical and mystical knowledge. They are messengers of change who are symbolic of wisdom and transformation (UNC Greensboro, 2017). It was strange then that there were no indigenous tales that included crows but three from European contexts. Native American stories also contain references to wolves, but not foxes as often. The series feature stories from the Cherokee and Chippewa nations, demonstrating the ability to find and retell authentic indigenous folktales from North America. Overall, the prevalence of these animals suggests an interest and ability to write about them, but unfortunately, only from a White perspective. With how common crow stories are in North American folklore, the publishers could have presented differing views on these non-human characters. Linguistic Suppression of Female Protagonists in Ethnic Folklore Linguistic Suppression and backgrounding were introduced in chapter two. One example of female backgrounding is in the folktale “How Water Came to Dry Lands.” Here, two named female characters are Blue Bird Woman and Snail. Blue Bird Woman has one job. She tells Chief Deer Man what she has heard from the townspeople. He takes it from there, and the story continues and finishes without her. While Blue Bird Woman is one character type, she is only referenced twice in the tale, and her presence is backgrounded through passive verbs and fewer descriptors. She had the ear of the people and could have played a more significant role than what she was given. When I engaged with situational context by searching for the origins of this Navajo tale retold in the textbook, I found a much stronger female presence for Blue Bird Woman in an author-published folktale in Lakota mythology. Blue Bird Woman in this story was married to High Horse and was a Lakota princess (Schell and Woldstad, 2012). When I looked for more on the second female character, Snail, I did find a Snail Girl folktale retold by Geri Keams;

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the protagonist alongside Snail Girl was not called Blue Bird Woman, but was named “First Woman”—a title that signifies her prominence. There was also no male character named Deer Man to take over the story as in the textbook reading (Keams, 1998). In my search for a Chief Deer Man or a Deer Man, I found Deer Man in Choctaw folklore named Kashehotapalo, who was a spirit. I found historical figures in Native American history with parts of this name, such as Chief Lame Deer, a Sioux traditional healer, and Chief Running Deer, a Cheyenne tribal leader (Weiser, 2021). When the theme of male exceptionalism is explored at the intersections of ethnicity, we see that OOWTE textbook authors took unnecessary steps to background the original female protagonist in “How Water Came to Dry Lands.” While white male stories put power on display through adjectives, the authors of indigenous stories such as this one conceal power. When this is examined using intertextual context clues, the textbook publishers felt comfortable mixing characters from different tribal tales—Navajo and Lakota certainly—insinuating a homogeneity among North American Indigenous peoples that is inaccurate and harmful to the identities of indigenous readers as well as those learning about indigenous cultures for the first time (Chen, Haufler, and Taam, 1999). The creation of Chief Deer Man using bits and pieces of various historical or folkloric artifacts suggests a disregard for not only the Native Americans who told these stories but for the subgenre itself. It points to a covert form of ethnocentrism wherein the authors of this series felt they could combine indigenous “sounding” words and create a believable character. Hirschfelder and Molin describe a common belief held in the contemporary United States that everyone has a right to use Native Americans as they see fit. Indianness is a national heritage that white people use to promote stereotypical violence, misrepresent the languages, and, in the case seen here, the naming traditions of Indigenous Peoples and commercialize Indians for sports teams, butter, and tobacco. They posit that this white privilege stems from the past time of “playing Indian” that dates to the European invasion of the Americas but that proliferates 20th and 21st century white American society—i.e., Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, etc. (Hirschfelder and Molin, 2018). Authors choose how to build their stories’ grammar, especially the title. In the textbook reading “How Water Came to Dry Lands,” the author chose to use the passive voice (Water Came) and avoid naming any actor from the story in the title. The title then, acts to suppress the actions of the character— Snail—who is the one responsible for bringing water to those dry lands. It personifies the noun “water” by attaching the verb to it, and it takes the focus off Snail in the story of who brought the water. The retelling by Keams is

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titled “Snail Girl Brings Water,” which puts the female protagonist in the subject position, making her the center of attention in Keams’ retelling and gives the title active voice, with Snail Girl taking action upon the water, which is part of the predicate in this title, making its role in providing information about the subject—Snail Girl (Keams, 1998). In the Keams retelling of this Navajo folktale, Snail—so-called in Benchmark—is called Snail Girl, emphasizing her half animal and half human nature, making her more complex than the textbook reading simply through naming. In the OOWTE retelling, her sex is obtained through pronouns used to describe her. This is an example of what Thompson calls “concealing” or when a text author disguises or hides the working of power by hiding information and telling only half-truths (Thompson, 1990). Thus, we see an additional layer to the marginalization of minority female voices wherein minority females are suppressed and backgrounded in favor of minority male voices created by the authors using indigenous “sounding” words. The second instance of linguistic suppression comes from the folktale “Chi Li and the Serpent” from Benchmark Grade 4. Most folk, fable, and fairy tales do not list their origins in the textbook, though a few do, such as the “Russian Cinderella,” “The Changing Tea Kettle: A Japanese Folktale,” and “The Loveliest Song of All: A Mayan Folktale.” The folk tale about Chi Li does not have its origins named, though it is a Chinese Folktale. However, the original title for this Folktale, translated from Mandarin, is “Chi Li Slays the Giant Serpent.” Compare this to the textbook version called “Chi Li and the Serpent.” In both titles, Chi Li is listed first, so the reader is aware of the protagonist. However, in the Benchmark version, her accomplishments or relationship to the serpent go unnamed. But, in the original text, the verb “slays” is collocated with Chi Li. Additionally, the word “giant” is used to describe the serpent, which supposes a giant snake as opposed to one of average size, making Chi Li’s slaying a much more significant accomplishment. Thus, the authors of the Benchmark version erase Chi Li’s actions from the title and remove a descriptive element of the serpent from the title, another example of concealing and linguistic suppression. This title that only names the characters and does not associate them with their actions is more common in European fables such as those by Grimm or Greek storyteller Aesop. The author’s decision to ignore the naming structure of the Chinese folktale in favor of a more European style denotes hegemony, or what Antonio Gramsci described as the complex process that allows dominant groups to establish and maintain control of subordinates by using specific ideologies and particular forms of authority that are reproduced via social and institutional practices (Leistyna, Woodrum, and Sherblom, 1996). The authors copied European naming practices onto a minoritized group’s work. This established a more predictable pattern for naming the stories but chose the design of the

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dominant ethnic groups within the genre. Using CRP, this issue exemplifies school curricula silencing minority voices and legitimizing white ways through the “standardization” of titles. This example conforms to the idea that racism is so ingrained in the fabric of our systems—in this case, education—as to appear normal. Now that non-humans have been given a thorough review through corpus descriptive analysis and interpretation of themes, it is time to shift focus to compare human characterization and representations of gender and ethnicity to that of non-humans. In this final section, the reader will be taken through most of the themes from this and the previous chapter to compare findings. A COMPARISON OF HUMANS AND NON-HUMANS The Corpus By examining the data gathered from ANTCONC’s pronoun searches for first humans and then non-humans, non-humans favor male characters more than human stories. While human stories showed an overall preference for males at a rate of 2:1 in Benchmark, they showed a preference for males in non-human stories at a rate of nearly 3:1. In OOWTE, the ratio was 2:1 for human males and exactly 3:1 for non-human males. However, the lack of data surrounding non-humans in the OOWTE corpus makes this evidence less dependable. Using images of non-humans for marketing purposes is a proven strategy that demonstrates the power of non-human characters over the child as a consumer (Karpyn, Allen, Marks, Filion, Humphrey, Ye, May, and Gardner, 2017; Veer, 2013). Anthropomorphized protagonists often stand for human characters to deliver moral and social cues through their attitudes and actions (Harju and Rouse, 2017). Thus, the extreme preference for male voices in these non-human stories, of which there were 64 in the 12 textbooks, is concerning because of the lack of perspectives and voices of female and nonbinary characters. When comparing adjective collocations, there are further similarities. Just as human descriptions tended toward physical size, so did the language surrounding descriptions of non-humans. In both categories, male characters were more often characterized by words like “gigantic,” while females were characterized by their smallness, with words like “fairy-like” even for human females! However, when humans and non-humans are in stories together, non-human size tends to be larger than humans. Two examples include Chi Li’s dragon, which was drawn much larger than she. The giant and giantess in Jack in the Beanstalk retellings were obviously significantly bigger than Jack.

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A Comparison of Themes: Gender Traditional Family Values In chapter two, I demonstrated the theme of traditional WASP-like family values throughout texts featuring human characters. Females were doting mothers concerned with the cleanliness of their homes and children. I used Gee’s framework for Discourse Analysis, including the Significance Building Tool and the Why This Way and Not That Way Tool, to examine the gendered language, focusing on adjectives and verbs. In a remarkably comparable way, female non-humans take on these traditional values. I found an overlap between traditional values that denote distinct gender roles within the home for both humans and non-humans. For example, using Gee’s Subject Tool and Why This Way and Not That Way Tool, I examined unit 9 of Grade 1, which retells the fairy tale of “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” Even the title is curious, as the traditional title for this fairytale is “The Elves” (Grimm, Grimm, Crane, and Crane, 1963). This title places the male—the husband called Shoemaker—in the first position. His wife remains unnamed, and while the “Shoemaker” is named for his vocation, she is called only “his wife.” She remains in the background for the entirety of the story. She is only named for her relationship with the man in the story. However, in the Grimms’ tale, she enters the story in the second half and plays a significant role in thanking the elves for their service and designing and creating clothing for them. This demonstrates how in stories with non-humans only, humans only, and a mixture of human and non-human characters, the authors consistently painted pictures of patriarchy through familial gender roles and the erasure of the female voice. The series’ choice to include folk tales that displayed female animals in domestic roles perpetuates the stereotypes about women’s work that stories about human females within the series began. The publishers included stories like The Little Red Hen, a fable from the USA about a hen doing all the chores and preparing the bread. At the same time, her lazy housemates refused to help; The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen is another US fable where the sly fox leaves his mother at home to get started on dinner while he steals a hen from the henhouse. Instead of realizing the potential to challenge stereotypes through fantastical elements, the use of these non-human characters supported sex stereotypes. Male Exceptionalism In chapter two, I pointed out how, through verb analysis that male characters’ voices, actions, and descriptions displayed them as larger than life. Meanwhile, female voices, actions, and descriptions minimized their roles

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within the stories or suppressed their accomplishments. In female human characters, this was frequently accomplished by “thingifying” or personifying the artifacts within stories containing women to give credit to those things and hide the role of females. This marks a different strategy within the text for female backgrounding in humans than in non-humans. It was common for non-human females to be backgrounded through linguistic suppression, not through thingifying. In thingifying, the reader can still infer that though the artifacts take the verbs, the female is still involved—she is backgrounded. But, with linguistic suppression in these non-human stories, the verbs are entirely removed from the titles, and in the case of “How Water Came to Dry Lands,” the female protagonist is erased. She is suppressed. Another strategy used for non-human characters was to equate masculinity with intelligence and femininity with slowness. This does not show up to the same degree in human characters. Human females are not given descriptions that describe their intellect at all. Meanwhile, male characters receive descriptions promoting their intelligence. Female characters throughout both series did impressive things, but their emotional state was more likely than their intellect to influence their decision-making. So, in humans and non-humans, males receive descriptions that put their intelligence on display. However, only non-human females receive descriptions that put their slowness on display. Men Go Out/Women Stay Home This is another highly prevalent theme in both human and non-human stories. It was the most robust theme in the human stories and appeared in 36 of the 64 non-human stories. For textbooks in use in the 2010s and published as late as 2018, this antiquated theme not only does not reflect the reality of most families in the United States but is not suitable for society. Based on statistics from the 2019 census, the US Bureau of Labor stated that 57.1% of women were part of the labor force, while 69.2% of men worked outside the home (2022). According to the International Monetary Fund, the more women work, the more economies grow. Businesses that employ three or more women in leadership positions score higher on all organizational performance measures (LaGarde and Ostrey, 2018). Therefore, my findings are not good for female readers, are not good for the US economy, and are not truth-telling about American culture in the 21st century. Females are Cooperative/Males are Competitive In chapter two, I brought out examples of this theme using excerpts from various stories that demonstrated how female characters were likelier to share,

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befriend others, and overlook slights from others, especially males. I also demonstrated that because both series focus on wars within multiple chapters in multiple textbooks, there is a consistent theme of male competition. Seventeen stories in OOWTE and 36 in Benchmark contain these themes, accounting for 22% of the readings. While this theme is not as prevalent in non-human stories, both themes exist. One example of the cooperative nature of female characters in non-human stories is in Benchmark Grade 4. There is a fairytale called “A Pot of Gold” about a little girl named Cora. The story is told from a toad’s point of view, and only the Toad speaks or acts. The reader finds out that Cora has given away her food to Toad when the (male)Toad thanks her for “her kindnesses.” He then decides to give her gold. He says, “I am very hungry,” and “I will repay your kindness.” Here, despite the insinuation that Cora has done something for which Toad is grateful, her actions are absent from the language of the text. This story contains themes of female cooperation and muting her accomplishments and voice. Cora’s charity and thoughts are absent linguistically in favor of reading the Toad’s complaints and promises. While there is, of course, the example of Aesop’s “Tortoise and the Hare” fable, most non-human stories focus more on cooperation and accomplishments than competition. “How Beetle Got Her Coat” is a fable from Benchmark Grade 2 that references a race between a bird and a beetle. However, the element of competition is present with male and female characters, and the female wins the race. Thus, while the theme of competition exists, it is not a gendered theme within non-human stories in the same way it targets males in human stories. Comparisons with Ethnicity The Erasure of the Black Culture Stories from Africa, such as Nigerian “Why Turtle’s Shell is Cracked” and West African “Why Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears” are present in the series. Out of the 20 non-human stories that are not Eurocentric, five come from the African Continent. These stories stand out because they are each animal-only. No human or human-like (ex: mythical warrior or superhero) characters exist in these stories. In contrast, stories from the Asian continent all contain humans or human-like characters. Indigenous North American stories have these types of characters, and one South American folktale contains humans and a Great Spirit in human form. All Euro-Centric novels include humans, and many of the European folk and fairy tales do as well. The Pew Research Center found that as of 2019, over 4.6 million African immigrants live in the United States. 1 in 10 Black people in the US are

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immigrants, and the US is projected to resettle 9.5 million African immigrants by 2060 (Tamir, 2022). Thus, classrooms do educate students who would identify with characters of African, Black Hispanic, or Caribbean origin. In 2018, 223,893, or 4.2% of K-12 ELLs, identified as Black. In California, where Benchmark is published, 1.7% are Black. In Texas, where On Our Way to English is published, 2.4% are Black (Office of English Language Acquisition, 2021). The results of this study, though, are comparable to Anya’s (2021a) look at the representation of Black people in World Language (Spanish) textbooks, which demonstrated marginalization and underrepresentation for these demographics especially given that approximately 1/3 of the Spanish-speaking population is Black. Still, the stark contrast between what is learned about European cultures vs. what is learned about Black cultures of the Caribbean and African Continent displays an epistemological racism that legitimates knowledge—primarily cultural. The lack of cultural imagery and references to Black cultures within the few examples of Black cultural tales exemplify epistemological racism (Guerrettaz and Zahler, 2017). Lee and Collins explains how common it is for world language textbooks to present white experiences as representative of speaker populations (Lee and Collins, 2015). The same holds in these texts. It is not as if African, Caribbean, and Black South American folklore are only or even primarily animalistic fables such as those told by Aesop. While many “why” stories from African cultures have been popularized in contemporary American culture and chiefly present animals only, mythical human-like characters and humans within fantastical folklore do exist and are simple to locate. Usborne, a US and UK publisher of children’s books, sells many anthologies of fables, folklore, and fairytales from around the world, both animal stories and retellings of myths of human and mythical creature interaction, such as “Fire of the Jaguar” from the Kayapo of Brazil, the Anansi stories—“trickster” folktales from the Ashanti and Akan peoples in Ghana—and “The Missing Goddess” from Ancient Egypt are only those within ONE anthology for children that contain humans and mythical creatures (Baer, 2016). Tracy Baptiste retells Caribbean folktales about the Jumbies—friendly monsters from Trinidadian folklore, with middle-grade novels and children’s short stories available in local libraries within the USA (2021). The podcast Circle Round which is immensely popular and freely available has 166 folktales worldwide with lessons and resources to go with them. With a plethora of options at their disposal, the publishers erased the possibility of learning about Black cultures in favor of learning about White ways of knowing, essentially silencing minority voices and legitimizing white perspectives, holding storytellers like Grimm and Aesop as canonical.

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Multilingualism A classroom based on an “English Only” pedagogy may be well-intentioned— to prepare students for workplace and community engagement in an environment that predominantly speaks English. However, according to noted applied linguist Dr. Suresh Canagarajah, a classroom with this singular focus limits linguistic skills acquisition and language creativity and unnecessarily limits production in that classroom. When students are allowed access to their own home language/s in the English classroom, they produce texts in a wider range of genres, are more active in their language use, and are better able to collaborate with their peers. They develop linguistic skills like negotiation strategies and communicative competence for a real world that contains multilingualism. Canagarajah argues that classes based in monolingual pedagogies stunt students’ abilities to communicate in contexts where linguistic pluralism exists (2015). Contrary to past assumptions that allowing the first language use in the classroom will “interfere” with acquisition of a second language, the relationship between first and second languages in the classroom is positive. Explicit discussion of multiple languages in the classroom can facilitate faster learning of concrete nouns, true and false cognates, and abstract grammar ideas. Allowing home language lowers the affective filter which allows learners to uptake their additional language more easily (Diaz-Rico, 2018). On the forefront of a multilingual strategy for language education called translanguaging is Dr. Ofelia Garcia, who describes one key principle is that students can use their entire linguistic repertoire as a resource for learning and as identity markers that point out innovative ways of knowing, being, and communicating. She strongly advocates hanging bilingual posters and signs, displaying student work in their various languages, creating multilingual word walls, providng lecture notes in multiple languages, including books in the classroom library in students’ home languages, providing subtitles for video clips in English and home languages among other ideas for building students’ linguistic repertoires (Garcia, Ibarra Johnson, and Seltzer, 2017). With this foundation in place for the benefits of multiple languages present and valued in the English Language Learning classroom, it is imperative to explore multilingual usage in these texts for both their cultural and ethnic value and their pedagogical value to multilingual learners. Of the 20 stories from non-White cultures, few examples of multilingualism exist. In OOWTE Grade 5, “The Loveliest Song of All” is labeled a Mayan folktale and includes one word—“chirimia”—the name of the musical instrument the Spirit of the Woods gave a young man. In OOWTE Grade 4, “How Water Came to Dry Lands,” labeled a Navajo Folktale, contained the word “Dine,” which is the Navajo word meaning “the people.” Benchmark

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Grade 3, “How the World Was Made,” labeled a Cherokee myth, includes one word—“Galun’lati,” a term that is not defined in the text but can be inferred to be a Cherokee word for heavens or skies. And finally, in the same textbook, “The Changing Tea Kettle,” labeled a Japanese folktale, the word “tanuki” is defined as a foxlike animal or raccoon-dog in popular Japanese folktales. Unfortunately, that is the extent of multilingualism. While stories like “Chi–Li and the Serpent” describe cultural artifacts, they use English words only. In Chi-Li, the author describes the rice balls thrown at the serpent but does not call them by their Chinese name—Tang Yuan. All the rest of these animal stories, fables, folktales, and fairytales are anglicized. No stories from the African continent contain multilingual references or even references to the country or culture of origin. Only “Melamut the Crocodile” contains a geographic reference that someone with member resources could use to make inferences. The crocodile lives on the Nile River. Thus, it could be inferred that the story took place in Egypt. Other stories from Europe named their culture of origin, such as “A Russian Snow White,” but only English was used. As mentioned in chapter two, there are stories featuring protagonists of color that contain language use other than English. Vietnamese festivals and foods and Spanish familial terms remained linguistically accurate. However, one activity in Benchmark Grade 4 is particularly harmful in its discussion of multilingualism. The activity is titled “Use Context Clues to Understand Foreign Terms.” The activity provides snippets from two poems that are not referenced anywhere in the textbook in full. They are “Who Could Tell” and “Green Gold.” The poet is not named in the reading sample for the activity. The snippets are all Spanish quotes from the poems. The next column provides context clues in the form of English words that come before and after the Spanish phrases. Beneath each line is a revised definition of the Spanish phrase in English. The final question in the activity asks the reader why the poet chose to use “foreign words” in her poems. An initial question here is why the activity repeatedly uses the word “foreign” to refer to these Spanish phrases. Foreign to whom? 82% of the 2,360,744 multilingual students in California’s public schools where this textbook was published initially are Spanish speakers (California Department of Education, 2022). These phrases would not be foreign to them, nor would they need context clues in English to determine their meanings. This activity uses a term that others the language spoken by 53 million people in the United States as by using the term “foreign.” Current research in multiliteracy demonstrates that allowing students to use their entire linguistic repertoire to navigate a text is much more efficient than relying only on English (Garcia, Ibarra Johnson, and Seltzer, 2017). So,

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while context clues could be a helpful strategy for defining unfamiliar words, in the activity on this page, translanguaging would be preferable (Sánchez and García, 2022). This is yet another example of problematizing bilingualism for people of color, as referenced in chapters one and two. As espoused by Flores and Rosa, this is a raciolinguistic ideology that positions English as superior linguistically to Spanish and assumes that Spanish is the “foreign” in need of English to clarify it for the reader (2019). This establishes a connection between the theme of overreliance on white knowledge from non-human stories and an overreliance on white discourses in human stories from chapter two. A hierarchy becomes apparent when intersectionality is considered with human, non-human, European and non-white minorities. Stories that feature the perspectives, ideologies, values, and languages of white males of European origins are most prevalent and contain the most significant depth of description for both human and non-human characters. Both humans and non-humans in these stories are characterized based on their size, with a preference for large males and petite females. Intelligence is given to male characters, and for females, accomplishment is possible, but their diminutive size, sex, or even wit is an obstacle to overcome. Indigenous stories about humans and non-humans sometimes but not always name the nation of origin and use indigenous words in the retelling, which pays homage to the storytellers. However, there were several times when authors believed they could take liberties within these stories to create “indigenous sounding” names and to mix and match characters from across Indigenous folklore, creating a harmful homogenization of indigenous peoples, both male and female, in stories featuring humans and mythical creatures. Non-human female characters in these stories received the brunt of this linguistic suppression. Only one series—On Our Way to English: Texas— focused on the stories and lived experiences of immigrant families from Latin and South America as well as China and Vietnam. These stories presented family, food, festivals, and folklore in a positive light with multilingualism and authentic storytelling through counternarratives. Only stories about and written by Black people in North and South America and Africa contained no examples of multilingualism, no nods to the cultures of origin for the peoples or their stories. Black women were consistently given less space and mischaracterized when they existed in the text. This is true for both series in question.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I focused on continuing to use Critical Race Theory within Fairclough’s Framework for Critical Discourse Analysis while asking questions from Gee’s methods for discourse analysis. I demonstrated the overlapping nature of the first two stages of Fairclough’s Framework. I pushed the limits of intersectionality proposed by Crenshaw to include gendered non-human characters of color and multilingualism. The results demonstrated a hierarchy of treatment of dominant and non-dominant cultural groups that transcended human texts and recurred similarly and uniquely within non-human stories. In the next chapter, I will look closely at the genre’s roles in gender representation and its intersections with ethnicity. I have begun categorizing stories in this unit on non-humans into fables, fairytales, and folktales. In the next chapter, I will introduce the other genres present within these 12 texts and provide strategies for interrogating them as genres that represent gender and ethnicity in telling ways.

Chapter 4

The Role of Genre

INTRODUCTION This chapter has two main goals. First, this chapter sets out to demonstrate empirically that specific genres are more responsible than others for biases discussed in chapters two and three. Second, this chapter will deepen the theoretical understanding of how corpus tools and CDA can be employed to analyze children’s literary genres. Genre was originally a literary term but has become a word that can be used for a plethora of categories. Genres vary in complexity and frequency, from advertisements to legal writings. Bazerman and Prior define genres as “forms of life, ways of being, and frames for social action” (2004, 311). There is a difference then between “genres” and “texts. Genres are realized through language, and texts are genre performances described by their communicative purposes. Genres shift under external pressures, vary in prototypicality, and contain structure, such as how encyclopedias move from general to specific entries while fictional and historical genres typically move from specific to general in form. Discourse analysts thus may treat genre differently than classroom educators (Swales, 2014). The question raised in this chapter is what role literary genre plays in reflecting egalitarian or patriarchal gender and ethnicity tropes within the corpus of language learning materials. I will demonstrate how to use computational tools to describe the language, then how Fairclough’s framework for CDA at the interpretation phrase can be used alongside critical feminist elements of genre study to deconstruct the readings for their representations of gender and their intersections with ethnicity using CRT and introducing other critical racial sociological theories. The texts realize these issues in separate ways, which will be discussed in an interpretation of the themes revealed through the description of the corpus. 65

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DESCRIPTION I reviewed the 12 textbooks by hand, associating each article with its genre. I used The Bedford Book of Genres: A Guide and Reader to ensure consistent labeling using genre conventions. I then placed them into TXT files that I labeled according to genre and series (EX: Poetry CA). The genre categories shared by both the series were: Narrative, Personal Narrative, Biography/ Autobiography, Nonfiction, and Folktale/Fable. Benchmark had Fairytales and poems involving gender, so they are analyzed separately as smaller corpora. All the texts were entered electronically and edited manually before collocational analyses were performed. I developed the corpus and interrogated it in the exact same manner as described in chapters two and three. I used ANTCONC to look at gendered nouns and pronouns first, then action verbs associated with male and female nouns. I also pulled out adjectives collocating with those gendered nouns. The main difference between the corpus analysis here is that I divided the corpus and the results of the queries by genre, series, and sex as opposed to only by series and sex. This chapter will look more closely at experiential values in the description stage of CDA. These values “reflect the knowledge and beliefs of the producer in question, which is evident in the choice of wordings” (Fairclough, 2015, 94–95). Nouns I begin with the noun study by genre. I catalogued every gendered noun by genre, but I have listed the top 10 by genre in Tables 4.1 and 4.2 below. One way that experiential value is demonstrated is through “overwording” This phenomenon is realized through a preoccupation with certain words or phrases that may point to an ideological value. By pulling out gendered nouns and then gendered pronouns, as seen in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 in chapter two, it is not difficult to know where the preoccupation exists with male-gendered language. Looking only at types of gendered nouns by genre for Benchmark, there are two that provide equality. Narratives and fairytales are almost 50% female within Benchmark texts. Three genres preferred males—biographies were 66% male, folktales and non-fiction were 75% male, and personal narratives were 60% male. Only poetry texts saw a slight preference toward females, with 53% of gendered nouns being feminine. When considering tokens of gendered nouns, the disparity becomes slightly more apparent. 75% of all gendered nouns in biographies are masculine, 70% in folktales, 54% in fairytales, 55% in narratives, 79% in non-fiction, 62% in personal narrative,

Fable

Melamut-7 Hen-3 Master-2 Brother-2 Aesop-1 Clyde-1 Henhouse-1 Madam-1 Man-1 Mother-1

Biography

Tesla-20 Edison-19 Scott-19 Twain-19 Franklin-11 Thomas-10 Tom-10 King-9 Boy-8 Sampson-8

Man-21 Paul-14 Woman-14 Harry-13 Girl-12 Men-11 Prince-9 Henry-8 John-8 Trina-1

Folktale Midas-21 King-18 Girl/s-18 Billy-15 Daughter/s-14 Queen/s-14 Jack-13 Hercules-11 Man/en-11 Katie-9

Fairytale

Table 4.1 Benchmark Top 10 Gendered Nouns by Genre

Tom-26 Jack-23 Stanley-22 Mom-16 Stepsisters-14 Miguel-13 Meg-12 Fred-11 Mother-10 Sarah-10

Narrative Washington-25 Man/en-21 Edison-18 Woman/en-14 Bell-12 Franklin-9 Michelle-8 Whitney-8 Borglum-7 Coffin-7

Non-fiction

Dad-13 Man/en-12 Camila-11 Mother-10 Martha-9 Mom-8 Tesla-8 Uncle-8 Fletcher-6 Master-6

Personal Narrative

Man-6 John-5 Woman-5 Henry-4 Boy-3 Cesar-2 Hen-2 Son-2 Chavez-1 Girls-1

Poetry

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Table 4.2 OOWTE 10 Top Gendered Nouns by Genre Biography Margaret Howard Francisco Quang Knight Christa Jefferson John Lourdes Pullen

20 12 11 10 8 7 7 6 6 5

Fable/Folktale

Narrative

Man 14 Dad Ping 6 Dolley Princess 6 Martha Emperor 5 Chay King 3 Jasmin Woman 2 Jun Ming Daughter 2 Bert Men 2 Ivan Noble 2 Miguel Bride 1 Max

19 15 14 12 11 11 10 10 10 9

Non-Fiction Gus Huck Carlota Man/en Girl Gods Hernando Boy Priests de Soto

11 9 8 4 2 2 2 2 2 2

Personal Narrative Dad mom/s Scott Dean Robert Bob Cortes Papa grandfather Hector

42 36 13 10 10 9 9 9 8 8

and 64% in poetry. Only fables demonstrated a marked change toward feminine nouns, with 62% of token nouns being feminine. All the genres in OOWTE overwhelmingly favor male characters in type. 67.2% of the gendered nouns in personal narratives are masculine. Gendered nouns in non-fiction texts are 84% masculine. Gendered nouns in narratives are 66% masculine. Gendered nouns in Fable/Folktales are 62% masculine. Finally, gendered nouns in biographies are 64% masculine in type. This differs slightly from Benchmark, which had more equality in narratives by type of gendered nouns. Otherwise, by genre, the two series contain gendered noun types at about the same rate. Table 4.1 contains the top 10 gendered nouns in each genre of Benchmark. In every genre but fable, the most frequent noun is masculine in Benchmark. Nine of the top ten most frequent nouns in the biography genre refer to historical males—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Dred Scott, Mark Twain, and Benjamin Franklin. Only Deborah Sampson makes the top 10 list, demonstrating that when the publishers and writers had options for choosing historical figures to write about, they overwhelmingly chose male figures over female figures. The results are similar in the non-fiction genre, where George Washington, Gutzon Borglum, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, and Levi Coffin make the top 10 most frequent gendered nouns. The noun “Michelle” in the female list refers to a child interviewing a person of interest, not an actual historical or cultural figure. Again, when the publishers could have chosen any historical or cultural figure or event, they overwhelmingly decided to write about male figures, male-centric events, and male-centric accomplishments. There was a flaw of note in conducting a noun analysis by genre for sex that only became apparent when examining the fable genre. In the fable genre, the noun count tool does not provide information about gendered characters, as many characters are named for the animal they represent, which I

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did not use for sex identification. Melamut, the crocodile, is one of the few characters with a name. Fox is a familiar character in fables but could not be counted because it is not a gendered word. Hen is a gendered noun, so it is included. This represents a flaw in using concordancing tools to determine gendered nouns in non-human texts, which extends to this particular genre. Type vs. Token When considering the token gendered nouns, there is a unique perspective within the biography genre for OOWTE. The other genres have tokens of gendered nouns at about the same rate as types of gendered nouns, with female nouns appearing in narratives at 33% type, 32% token, personal narratives at 32% type, 26% token, non-fiction at 15% type, 20% token, and fable/folktale at 38% type, 26% token. Biography is the only genre with a marked difference in how feminine nouns are presented within the texts when examining the token references. While only 26% of the gendered nouns in biographies are feminine by type, 52% of all gendered nouns are feminine by the token. This is one important reason to examine both token and type when examining learning materials for gender representation. What this implies is that while there are fewer female characters than male characters in this genre, female visibility in the genre is on par with male presence. Those fewer characters are allocated about the same amount of space in the text as the male characters, who enjoy a greater variety of representations in the text. Table 4.2 displays the top 10 most frequent gendered nouns by genre in OOWTE. Their tokens are listed beside each word. In the biography genre, several readings focus on females, as seen in column one of Table 4.2. Christa Sadler is a tour guide on the Colorado River. Hildegarde Howard is the first female paleontologist recognized for her own contributions and paid for her work. Harriett Pullen, referenced last in the biography genre, is a female entrepreneur who made her fortune during the 1849 gold rush. Margaret Knight, the most frequent name in the biography genre, is an accomplished inventor. In addition to writing articles about famous women, OOWTE featured biographies of ordinary children who are meant to be relatable to the reader. Lourdes worked hard to become a citizen and enjoyed voting. Lourdes’s story is told in the third person, so does not count as personal or counter-narrative but is instead included in biography. So, while there are more masculine nouns by type, the attention these few females receive pushes the text into an equal representation of female characters by the token. Looking at both type and token by genre, clarity on where the text does well and where the text can improve is made more transparent. For the other genres, however, examining the token appearances of gendered nouns only points out the disparity between the representations of genders.

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The Fable/folktale genre study shows that while females are represented only 38% by type, they are further limited in only 26% of gendered nouns by the token. Intersections with Ethnicity One positive element of OOWTE writing surfaces in this corpus study that is absent from Benchmark. This is the cultural diversity in gendered proper nouns. In all genres except Fable/Folktale, names from non-European cultures make the top 10. This is more common in the OOWTE series to feature non-dominant perspectives. Publishers are known to attempt to create more relatable textbooks for a broad readership by “norming” to the white middle class (Richards and Rodgers, 2005). However, OOWTE seems to challenge this normative behavior and further consider the distinct readership in Texas, where the series was first produced, by including more voices and characters that reflect the distinct Texas classroom environments. Where Benchmark features primarily male WASP-like characters (White AngloSaxon Protestant) and shares the perspectives of males such as Cesar Chavez and John Henry somewhat infrequently as well as those of female minorities like Dolores Huerta and Zora Neale Hurston less so, OOWTE features minority voices more regularly, as evidenced by minority gendered nouns making the top 10 list in Table 4.2. Pronoun Description The results of pulling gendered pronouns from each genre in Tables 4.3 and 4.4 below are like those of gendered nouns mentioned earlier, with an intense bias toward male representation. As seen in Table 4.3 above, Benchmark had the most significant bias in all genres, with a male-to-female pronoun ratio of 6.7:1 in the non-fiction Table 4.3 Benchmark Gendered Pronouns by Genre Genre Biography Narrative Personal Narrative Folktale Fable Fairy Tale Poetry Non-fiction

Ratio He she Him her His himself Herself Total Male Female (M: F) 69 113 54

24 82 16

9 40 14

23 43 72 70 18 39

1 6 0

1 1 0

170 384 141

122 229 107

48 155 34

2.5:1 1.5:1 3.1:1

105 41 86 17 76

34 11 40 11 11

11 5 21 7 7

28 9 31 3 9

5 2 6 0 2

3 1 0 0 0

232 89 237 55 153

167 68 166 41 133

65 21 71 14 20

2.6:1 3.2:1 2.3:1 2.9:1 6.7:1

46 20 53 17 48

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The Role of Genre Table 4.4 OOWTE Gendered Pronouns by Genre Genre

He She Him her his Himself Herself Total Male Female

Ratio (M: F)

Biography Fable/ Folktale Narrative Non-fiction Personal Narrative

38 66 35 10

2 2

40 8

17 12

0 1

0 0

163 68

57 50

106 18

0.54:1 2.78:1

60 32 18 4 91 17

3 0 18

19 2 10

32 4 29

0 0 0

0 0 0

146 28 165

95 22 138

51 6 27

1.86:1 3.67:1 5.11:1

genre with the largest disparity at 1.5:1 in the narrative genre at the most equal. OOWTE had a male-to-female pronoun ratio of 5.1:1 in the personal narrative at the largest disparity and .5:1 in biography at the most comparable. Biography is the only genre in which female pronouns are found more often than male pronouns. In Benchmark, the noun study did not provide a complete picture of the linguistic representation of gender in fables. Most characters were named based on their species (e.g., fox and hen). The sex of the characters becomes evident only through examining pronouns. Thus, I posit that when studying genres that frequent non-human characters, concordancing tools should be used for gendered nouns and pronouns and examined together. Table 4.4 listed all the gendered pronouns from OOWTE by genre, with m/f ratios listed in the last column. The fable genre contains 68 male pronouns and only 21 female pronouns with an m/f ratio of nearly 3:1. I examined Aesop’s Fables in the Library of Congress and saw that the fables from Aesop in the series were gendered accurately. However, I also noticed that there are Aesop’s Fables that do not contain sex at all, such as “The Plain Tree” and “The Oak and The Reeds.” Another fact about Aesop’s Fables is that some fables have female protagonists and female villains. Four examples of this are “Owl and the Grasshopper,” “Lion and Mouse,” “Crane and Wolf,” and “Frog and the Ox.” So, while the writers keep sex accurate to Aesop’s design within the textbooks, the use of fables that favor male characters at a ratio of 2.78:1 shows an unnecessary gender disparity for the genre, as there are generous amounts of stories by Aesop alone that feature non-gendered or female characters. This is a missed opportunity to explore the folklore genre while featuring non-binary or female characters. Experiential Value through Gendered Hyponymy Continuing the exploration of experiential value, I posit the need to consider gendered hyponymy. Hyponymy is the meaning of one word embedded in the meaning of another word in one ideological discourse type. This can point to

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the experiential values expressed in the grammar and vocabulary of the texts, such as gender-marked words used for occupational stereotyping, where maleness or femaleness is embedded into the meaning of the occupational word. However, since not all the gendered embedded words in these corpora refer to occupations, I will use a term I coined—gendered hyponymy—to encompass the phenomenon more accurately. Since it was determined that only Benchmark used gendered hyponyms, I wanted to determine if one genre was the culprit. The results of a word study of the phonemes -man, -men, -girl, -boy, -master, and the suffix -ess were run through ANTCONC for each genre in Benchmark. The results are summarized in Table 4.5. The results demonstrate that the use of gendered hyponyms is more prolific in folktales and non-fiction but is not absent from any genre but poetry. Therefore, it is safe to say that gendered hyponyms, particularly “master” in four genres and gendered hyponyms with -men in four genres, are found regardless of genre. This is an issue with the series and the publishers, not elements of a genre, since OOWTE did not contain gendered hyponyms. Gendered hyponyms do not always signal an unwelcome shift in the text, as in “snowman” and “princess,” which are masculine generic, and specific in that order. Uses of the phoneme “-man” can signal an unnecessary gendering of a word. When a specific male is referenced within the text, the use of the gendered phoneme “-man” is more normative. However, using the gender-neutral term is preferred in 21st-century writing, regardless of the assumed gender identity of the person or the character’s sex in print media. Intersections with Ethnicity Studying how the texts engage in gendered hyponymy did not limit my exploration of experiential value to gender only but extended into gender’s intersections with ethnicity. In a short reading about an archeological discovery in Ancient Egypt, there is an example of how the text engages in gendered hyponymy and Eurocentric linguistic categorization. In the reading, the author defines a “Pharaoh” as a “king” of ancient Egypt. Not only does this reference a Eurocentric definition that does not appropriately define the ruler of ancient Egypt, but the word “king” also denotes a male ruler. However, evidence shows that there were indeed female Pharaohs. Goddesses were frequent in ancient Egyptian religion. Women in that culture could own land and businesses, marry, divorce at will, and hold political titles, even Pharaoh (ex: Cleopatra and Nefertiti). So, the author could have defined the pharaoh as a “ruler” of ancient Egypt and avoided the European-centric language and gendered hyponymy. In addition to the reading, vocabulary words with picture definitions are provided that are inaccurate and harmful. For example, the term “Egyptian”

#

1 2 2

Biography

businessman Princess Girlhood

master

Fable

3

#

Englishman nobleman boy-like princess giantess master sorceress

Fairytale

Table 4.5 Gender-Marked Words by Genre

1 1 1 4 1 1 1

# huntsman salesman tradesman snowman woodsman medicine men cowboy master

Folktale 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

# Councilman Snowman Businessman Mistress Master

Narrative 1 1 1 5 3

#

Businessman Englishman Minutemen Lumbermen Farmgirl Princess

Nonfiction

1 1 1 1 1 1

#

master

Personal Narrative

1

#

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is written under a drawing of enslaved people. In the reading, however, the enslaved people are called “workers” but are labeled simply as Egyptians in the images. This is confusing from the learner’s perspective as it does not match the text. But, it is also inaccurate from a historical standpoint. Egyptians often used human labor from conquered peoples living in or around them (Worrall, 2018). The writers could have placed a picture of an Egyptian person, preferably a contemporary image, next to this term for accuracy, clarity, and cultural appropriateness. Verb Study The clusters tool was employed to identify verbs collocating with the pronouns “she” and “he” for each genre and in each series. In Benchmark, there was a more comprehensive range of verbs associated with males than with females in each genre. The genre with the largest disparity between sex in activity was non-fiction, where verbs associated with males were read four times as often as verbs related to females. The genre with the greatest equality in terms of activity was fairytales, where male verbs were seen at a ratio of 1.5:1. These are types of verbs as opposed to tokens, which insinuate greater flexibility in activity for male agents than for females. Experiential Value through Classification Schemes Another phenomenon that can determine experiential value is classification schemes. This is the categorizing or evaluating of things or people. These schemes can work to emphasize the similarities and differences between groups (Fairclough, 2003). Verbs and adjectives are two parts of speech used to classify male and female characters. Interestingly, even though male nouns and pronouns are more frequent within the series, this did not predetermine that males would also have a greater variety of activities within each genre than females. Female verbs are active by genre at about the same rate as male verbs. So, while males appear more often and in a greater variety of activities, the activities for each sex are active and passive at the same rate. The types of activities that male and female agents engage in differ by genre and sex. In the Personal Narrative genre, females often make sounds— “call,” “ask,” and “cry.” But, in the Fairytale genre, females make very few sounds but use more physical movements—“grabbed,” “ran,” “dropped,” “tossed,” and “turned.” The Personal Narrative is where female verbs are most active, but their activity involves speech and not physical movement. In every genre, active verbs for males use physical movements. Additionally, male verbs are more associated with activities than physical movements or

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sounds. For example, in the biography genre, males “built,” “drew,” “published,” “invented,” and “read.” This Genre study on OOWTE demonstrated a remarkable difference between the two series. While overall, both series had an increased variety of verbs associated with males, one genre—biography—held the opposite. Verbs related to females had a greater variety than males and were seen at an m/f ratio of 0.4:1. From the noun study, it became evident that OOWTE attempted to provide a variety of female perspectives within this genre, both historical and contemporary, famous, and ordinary—in a way that Benchmark did not. When comparing the specific types of activities males and females are engaged in by genre, both participate in similar activities within all genres. For example, “run” and “work” are common activities across multiple genres for both sexes. In the biography genre, male characters were more active in the form of physical movement, with no references to speech or other sounds. Males “fought,” “traveled,” “ran,” and “worked,” among other physical activities. This is unique as males and females in all other genres within this series contain verbs associated with sounds. This points to how the genre primarily focuses on male accomplishments but does address both achievements and the voice of females. In both series, females are more strongly associated with verbs about speaking—“call,” “tell,” and “say.” This may be related to the stereotype that females talk more than males and that males can be more active in a greater variety of environments than females. But the overall sentiment was a focus on female agency and voice. Thus, two classification schemes are set up with action verbs associated with sex across genres. Actions done by male characters are active, while activities done by female characters classify them as active speaking, both stereotypes of maleness and femaleness. Adjectives To study adjective collocations for each sex by genre, I first viewed the table of adjectives for each series found through pronoun and phoneme queries in ANTCONC. I then searched for each term by genre and used the KWIC format in ANTCONC to determine sex before placing it in a spreadsheet for sex and genre by series. The results indicate several critical findings for gendered descriptions by genre. First, in Benchmark, males are described with more adjectives and greater depth than females in every genre. The most significant descriptor disparity was fables, which had an m/f adjective ratio of 7.8:1. The most equally described genre regarding sex was folktale, with an m/f adjective ratio of 1.25:1. There are patterns for how male and female characters are described by genre in Benchmark. For example, in poetry, males are characterized by

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nationality, ethnicity, strength and stature, personality, intelligence, wealth, age, and timbre. At the same time, females were comparatively vague, with descriptions of nationality, age, and stature alone. 13 of the 14 times a female agent is described she is “little” in the Benchmark series in folktales. This genre also characterizes a female as “small,” “soft,” and “fairy-like,” which gives the impression that in this genre, female agents are regarded for their size primarily. 17 of the 39 adjectives in this genre for females consider her size. The greatest quantity of physical description adjectives for females in OOWTE are found in Fable/Folktale genre as well, where females are “small,” “tiny,” “old,” and “young.” Fable/Folktale is also where the greatest attention is paid to age for males. Males are “young” in this genre, though age is a rare descriptor in the other genres examined. Happiness is an emotional state or character trait common within all genres examined and is a descriptor for both males and females. As OOWTE has a significant phonics focus in grades kindergarten through two, and “happy” contains the [a] sound, this could explain its frequent use. The narrative genre has the widest variety of adjectives describing women. This genre has adjectives for age, personality, physical characteristics, and emotional state. Narrative is also the category where the ratio of descriptors is most similar between the sexes. As this is the genre where authors had the most liberty to write freely, the variety of descriptors makes sense. In genres such as folk and fairytales, where authors borrow someone else’s ideas, there may be limitations in the descriptions within the original work. This is where editors should consider which stories to include and exclude to create the most egalitarian text for the reader. INTERPRETATION In the second phase of Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, I examined frequent phenomena and placed them into categories based on emerging themes. I used Gee’s Toolkit for Critical Discourse Analysis to build these themes (Gee, 2011). By discussing common sense assumptions, I highlight what beliefs are ideological in nature. It is those things that give value to the text. Fairclough lists five categories to consult when interpreting what is seen and what is not. In the section that follows, I will explore three of these categories and their application to genre analysis alongside Gee’s tools and frameworks from outside linguistics. When looking at what is there using Gee’s “Why This Way” tool, Table 4.1-4.2 shows the ten most frequently used nouns in each genre. John Henry was a recurring character in folk tales and poetry, appearing in both top 10 lists for those genres. Paul Bunyan was another recurring character in the

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folktale genre, making the top 10 list. There are five Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill folktales in Benchmark. What is not there is any female presence in the genre. Each of these stories is an example of a male-centered, male-only tale, focusing on the adventures these men go out and have. Their adventures had a direct physical impact on the landscape of the USA. Paul Bunyan got rid of mosquitos for a summer (Grade 4, unit 6), killed all the oak trees in Iowa (Grade 5, unit 3), and created rivers in the Midwest (Grade 3, unit 2). Pecos Bill made Death Valley (Grade 5 unit 8). These two characters are, of course, important in American folklore. However, by solely presenting these stories, the text structure and point in Fairclough’s framework insinuate a genre that is only about males. But when I use situational context—my background knowledge of US tall tales—I see that the publishers showed a lack of gender diversity when there are female folk characters such as Sally-Ann Thunder-Ann Whirlwind Crockett, Slue Foot Sue, and Annie Oakley, who are important within the genre as well. This genre in the corpus also heroizes males for their strength and adventures. Pecos Bill was “the roughest, toughest cowboy in the West.” He had “powerful hands” and “hit the ground so hard that he created Death Valley.” Paul Bunyan is called “the giant woodsman” and “a giant of a human being,” “a resourceful man” with a “gigantic tongue.” He is called a “famous lumberjack” who “was so powerful that he could fell twelve trees in a single stroke.” John Henry was called “a powerful boy” and “Mighty John Henry.” These men are celebrated for their robust nature, physical size, and strength. The text structure and point provide overt connections between maleness and power repeatedly. Using intertextual context—male proper nouns in addition to adjectives of power, strength, and size across texts—this sub-genre of folklore perpetuates ideologies of male exceptionalism and continues to equate masculinity with strength and adventure. By repeatedly associating their actions with innate power and size, such as strong hands, gigantic tongues, and giant humans, the author is trying to create a particular cause and effect— physical power and size act upon the landscape of the USA. This ignores the reality that enslaved peoples built the USA, oftentimes against the wishes of the Native Peoples who already inhabited and respected these lands. They focus on the idealized national stories of primarily white male heroism and leave out ethnic histories that could have acted to counterbalance these white male tall tales. With these folkloric retellings, the authors use adjectives to build noun phrases that inform our understanding of what makes a hero. Folklore is a genre traditional and value-laden, describing ways of thinking and behaving. According to Sims and Stephens, folklore is written to “help us learn who we are and how to make meaning in the world around us” (2005, 1–2). A hero, by this definition and the language in the textbooks,

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is strong, large, white, and male. He makes a lasting impact on the landscape, and readers should want to be like that. Exploring Intersectionality Through Multiple Lenses While Fairclough’s framework for CDA is the foundation of the analysis in this section, I use multiple lenses to explore gender and ethnic representations across genres. In this next section, I will pull in literary theories and work from linguistic anthropology alongside methods from Critical Race Theory, abstract racial sociological hypotheses, and d/Discourse Analysis framework to look more closely at genre’s roles in representation. Looking at Folk Tales again, though John Henry is undoubtedly an exceptional folktale with a protagonist of color, “American” folklore is presented to the reader as a WASP-ish genre. The characters are adventurous and are part of the construction and settling of the western frontier. The “tall tales” of US Folklore promote what Martin and Nakayama explain as the “grand narrative” where US Americans are taught that our founding fathers built a nation based on equality, liberty, and freedom. Manifest destiny pushed the nation further west to become a great nation wherein we can celebrate “American Exceptionalism”—an identity that is important to their notion of what it means to be an American (Martin and Nakayama, 2018). Thus, when examining folklore through genre analysis, it is important to consider the culture’s grand narrative as well as racial and ethnic histories that are either retained or lost through the folktale being analyzed. Using the “Why This Way And Not That Way” tool for examination, I saw that Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill both have multiple stories in this genre about the powerful ways they changed the landscape of the western frontier, which according to the texts, was empty until they settled it and bent it to their wills. In these folk tales, indigenous peoples who had inhabited the west for far longer go unmentioned. Their contributions to the physical characteristics of the USA are absent or erased. Yet their nations existed long before Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and the railroad builder John Henry. When folk tales about indigenous peoples are shown to readers, a thorough analysis demonstrates gender and ethnic representation disparities. Considering racial and ethnic histories of the North American Continent is important when examining these series’ representations of Indigenous peoples through their folklore. Using situational context and intertextual context as frames for viewing Native American folktales, I see they are not presented as “American” folklore, despite the majority of them taking place in North and South America based on the tribes represented within them. When Indigenous tales are told, they are not included in sections allocated to US Folklore but are scattered throughout the texts.

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The folktales do not consistently name the tribe which has passed down the tale, nor do the tales name the part of North or South America where the stories take place, unlike in the US Tall Tales stories that contain explicit information on where the characters impacted the US landscape. One way the lack of ethnic or tribal naming in the genre impacts the reader’s understanding of Indigenous Peoples is to assume homogeny and distance from the “American” folklore containing white men’s stories that promote the US’ Grand Narrative. Through a CRT lens, this supports the liberal myth of colorblindness through the way this curriculum presents race, which presumes homogeneity with an “us” vs. “them” perspective. The authors name the white male folk heroes as Americans (us) and use ambiguous or inaccurate names for Native American folk heroes without referencing their American identities (them). This creates a false multicultural perspective. In chapter three, I discussed this phenomenon in more depth using the Navajo folktale “How Water Came to Dry Lands.” This was a story that, fortunately, named the nation of origin. Other indigenous folktales did not, such as “Let the Water Flow” from OOWTE Grade 2, unit 5, about two First Nations at war over water rights and how a young girl brought peace. This tale, too, incorporated how the characters changed the landscape by re-routing a river. However, unlike the folktales of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, the reader does not know anything specific about the protagonists nor where the impact was felt in the landscape of the Americas. In the next section, I will share another indigenous folktale from this series in greater depth to illustrate the pervasiveness of this and other genre-based issues of misrepresentation of First Nations peoples. USING THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR GENRE ANALYSIS In this section, I will demonstrate the need for including various theoretical frameworks from outside critical discourse analysis to appropriately frame interpretations of genres through CDA. Fairy tales provide excellent examples for applying theoretical frameworks to genre analysis. Situated-Meaning Theory “Yeh-Shen” in Benchmark’s Book 2 unit 2 is an example of how fairy tales can be analyzed at this second stage for gender and its intersections with ethnicity. This story is a Chinese Cinderella story. I only know this because of my situational context, as the authors do not name the culture for this retelling. In the textbook adaptation, Yeh-Shen meets a man at the water’s

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edge who gives her magic, which she chooses to use to make herself a new outfit for a banquet. Her physical beauty attracted the prince’s attention at the banquet, and with the textbook’s final line, “Naturally, they lived happily ever after.” This phrase indicates intertextuality or a hearkening back to typical endings of Americanized fairy tales, which commonly end in “And they all lived happily ever after” (Greenhill and Matrix, 2010). Situated-Meaning is a theory from cognitive psychology that posits that humans actively build meanings when they use language in specific contexts. Thus, I ask what meanings listeners must attribute to specific words and phrases, given the context and how the context is construed (Gee, 2011). The author’s choice to begin the last sentence with “naturally” is troubling because it assumes that it is natural for any female to want to marry a male of high status, and it assumes that this female will, of course, be better off than before—i.e., “happily ever after.” Hillary Janks says, “There is a great deal at stake in how we decide what is and is not part of nature.” (2014, 154). Naturalization is one of Thompson’s modes of operation of ideology. If a society names something as natural, we think it is unchangeable and absolute, and there is no need for further action. This leads us to draw conclusions based on cultural beliefs, not facts (1990). Figured Worlds Theory Next, I examined the text with Fairclough’s category of situational context, using a psychological anthropology theory about how cultures create and use ideas to inform meaning that promotes a mutual understanding of themselves and the world called “figured worlds.” Gee explains that figured worlds are: Narratives and images that different social and cultural groups of people use to make sense of the world function as simplified models of how things work when they are ‘‘normal” and ‘‘natural” from the perspective of a particular social and cultural group. They are meant to help people get on with the business of living and communicating without having to reflect explicitly on everything before acting. (2011, 150)

I thus asked what figured worlds the words and phrases in this text are assuming and what values are present in them. In this story, there are beliefs that a female should be “provided for,” a tenant of a patriarchal system. Secondly, she will be happy forever in the arms of a wealthy, high-status male, a belief held in most consumeristic and capitalistic societies, such as the United States. In this case, how natural is it for a woman to be happy marrying a man she has not met and who only desired her for her physical appearance? And why is his title enough to prove his worth, while Yeh-Shen must use magic to

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make a matching shoe and dress combination and go secretly to a banquet to prove her value? The king does not have to do anything to prove himself, to prove he will be kind to her, or to prove that he is a good king. The assumption that because he is king, he is excellent and worthy of any female he chooses sits in juxtaposition to Yeh-Shen’s processes to prove the same. Her physical appearance and relationship with a man give her value in this story. So then, the prince could be considered materialistic, for he objectified and commodified Yeh-Shen, choosing her for her appearance. However, this is not necessarily the work of the textbook authors because these values also appeared in the 9th-century tale (Louie, 1982). Even so, it begs the question of how great a role fairytales of this nature should play in an early literacy textbook. While the story can be valued for its context in 9th-century Chinese culture, perhaps placing it alongside a fractured or feminist version of this Cinderella story could balance some of the patriarchal tropes that are perpetuated by it. Another way to purposefully appreciate ancient Chinese cultural tales would be to choose a more egalitarian folktale from this culture and period, such as Nian the Chinese New Year Dragon (Loh-Hagan and Banks, 2020), Red Butterfly (Noyes, 2019), or The Empress and the Silkworm (Hong, 1995). In Benchmark’s Grade 2 unit 2, the fairytale “Rough-Faced Girl” is another Cinderella story by a culture the textbook did not name. A quick online search found that it is from the Algonquin people of Ontario. In the textbook version, the main character is disparaged for her appearance, insinuating a link for females between appearance and value again. However, she can see things others cannot. Through a hasty promise from an invisible yet handsome warrior that whoever can see him he will marry, a man’s rough-faced daughter makes an unlikely match. In this version, her value comes from her appearance and her male match. This story also removes the female character’s agency and choice by excluding her voice in the marriage arrangement. It is assumed that the female character will be better off married to the handsome warrior and that she needs no say in the matter. These stories reflect a sexist and male supremacist ideology yet again through the hidden curriculum which links achievement to masculinity and physical appearance to femininity. However, this adaptation of “Rough-Faced Girl” is sexist and male supremacist because of the textbook author’s take on the original, not because of the original, as will be explained in the next section. Intersections with Gender and Ethnicity I discovered the origins of “Rough-Faced Girl” and realized the depth to which the textbook writers altered this tale. I had initially assumed that the

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patriarchal ideologies promoted may have been examples of the figured worlds from which the story came, much like Yeh-Shen. Rafe Martin, an award-winning storyteller who has been a keynote speaker at myth, folklore, and storytelling conferences, wrote down Rough-Faced Girl from his studies of the Algonquin peoples and their story of the female mystic on the shores of Lake Ontario (Martin, 2011). In Martin’s retelling, the focus is on her inner character, not her appearance. Characters in Martin’s retelling who focused on her appearance are described derogatorily in the text. She and not her father sought the marriage alliance with Invisible One, showing agency and choice for the female protagonist. She is a female mystic in an honorable position, which is how she can see Invisible One, the warrior she eventually marries. It was also the Invisible One’s sister who negotiated the marriage, not Invisible One himself. In Martin’s version, Sister and Rough-Faced Girl speak far more words than Invisible One or Father. Visually, the images of Father are different. In the Benchmark series, Father is seen wearing a tribal headdress, a trope common in the caricatures of Native Americans (Hirschfelder and Molin, 2018). Martin’s Algonquin story explains that Father is poor in his tribe and dresses more modestly, like the first images of Native Americans taken with photography in the 19th century. Interestingly, the Alongonquin tale has a family of 3 sisters, but Benchmark’s version eliminates one sister. So, by eliminating one female character, silencing the autonomous voice of Rough-Faced Girl and Sister, while giving greater voice to Father and the Invisible One, purposeful steps were taken by the author to diminish and exclude females from the text named for the female mystic. This is not the work of a patriarchal folktale but of the author of a textbook reading. Intertextuality Using Fairclough’s fifth category of intertextual context through a literary theory of intertextuality, both these stories are illustrated and contain stylistic elements of minority culture fairy tales. However, the rhetoric perpetuates sexist ideologies common in the United States and Europe, representing a style-mixing of language. Neither of these retellings credited the cultures from which they were drawn. Both stories generalize cultures, insinuating that all ethnic minorities are the same. The authors seem selective in their inclusion of story origins. For example, a Snow White story in the textbook notes it is a Russian version. Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry’s stories provide enough geographical information to demonstrate their origins in the western United States. It seems then that folk and fairy tale stories from European roots are given precise locations or settings. But, when non-European culture

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folk and fairy tale stories are shared, generalizable tropes of what it means to be indigenous or Asian are all that point to the stories’ origins. In this section, I provided examples of how I use theories from outside linguistics for critical genre analysis within Fairclough’s Framework for CDA through fairy tales. These examples were chosen because this genre is known for its overt sexism and eurocentrism, making it an “easy target” for analysis. This does not mean that they are the biggest perpetrators of sexist and hegemonic gender representations in the corpora or contribute the most to Eurocentric ideologies compared to the other genres in the corpora. Biographies were 66% male, and non-fiction was 75% male based on gendered noun descriptive analysis in ANTCONC. The most significant bias in all genres for gendered male pronoun use was in non-fiction at 6.7:1 (M: F) in the Benchmark corpus. When considering token-gendered nouns, the disparity becomes more apparent. 75% of all gendered nouns in biographies are masculine, and 79% are masculine in non-fiction. Nine of the top ten most frequent nouns in the biography genre refer to historical males—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Dred Scott, Mark Twain, and Benjamin Franklin. The results are similar in the non-fiction genre, where George Washington, Gutzon Borglum, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, and Levi Coffin make the top 10 most frequent gendered nouns. By conducting a thorough textual analysis with corpus tools like ANTCONC and Stanford NLP, I have quantifiable data demonstrating the proliferation of white male voices throughout these two non-fiction genres at an astounding rate. A more thorough linguistic analysis at the interpretive stage of Fairclough’s CDA presents more subtle and covert sexism and ethnocentrism. Thus, the rest of this chapter will focus on interpreting the most prolific perpetrator of stereotypical gender representations and their intersections with ethnicity using the tools explained in the previous sections of this chapter. I will continue to draw upon literary and sociocultural theories to analyze biographies and pull them out for explanation and exemplification. BIOGRAPHIES INTERPRETATION Minimizing of Female Perspectives Male-focused biographies occur more frequently. Specific male biographies are often repeated throughout multiple readings in a unit, as with Joseph Plumb’s story featured twice in Benchmark Grade 5 unit 7 or various textbooks like Thomas Edison (Benchmark Kindergarten, Grades 2, 3, 4), Alexander Graham Bell, (Benchmark Grades 2, 3) and George Washington (Benchmark Kindergarten, Grades 1, 2, 3, 5). They are longer than female

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biographies. For example, in OOWTE Grade 5 unit 10, Marie M. Daly’s biography is related in 12 paragraphs of text. However, her name is not mentioned after the fourth paragraph. The rest of the article—eight more paragraphs— focuses on biology and digestion, even though the title is “Marie M. Daly: Biochemistry Pioneer.” This reading does not share her background, hobbies, or interests but focuses only on her work. In contrast, Edison, who has biographies in Benchmark Kindergarten, Grade 2, 3, and 4, teaches the reader his middle name—Alva, that he loved to read and learn, that he was curious, places he visited, his numerous inventions, and how his goals and inventions differed from other inventors of his time, such as Tesla. In Benchmark, males have sentences about their hobbies, occupations, interests, and upbringing, which are often absent from female biographies or non-fiction works containing female protagonists. A notable example is an article in Benchmark Grade 3 unit 1, “It’s My Right.” The article begins with the story of how Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. What is missing, however, is a description of who she is. There is no mention of hobbies, interests, occupation, or upbringing. In some biographies, these may not be relevant details. Still, as Rosa Parks was an active leader in the NAACP and the WPA, her interests in civil rights activism and her occupation are relevant. Master Scripting The absence of these details, coupled with the quote chosen for this article from Parks—“I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around.”—position her as a tired woman in the right place at the right time, not as an informed activist making a conscious decision that impacted the civil rights movement. Ellen Swartz calls this “master scripting.” She posits that in societal discourse, content that does not reflect the dominant voice is disempowered through misrepresentation or mastered and brought under control before it is added to the master script (Swartz, 1992). Master scripting her story is typical in textbooks written from the perspective of the white majority culture. These details show up in many male biographies and non-fiction stories. In the following reading on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., readers learn about his profession, upbringing, interests, and background. And the reading on Henry Roberts directly before Parks’ article describes Robert’s interests in reading and leadership aside from what he is famous for, Robert’s Rules of Order. These excerpts demonstrate that in the same chapter, even dealing with the same topic of civil rights, Parks’ characterization is flat in comparison.

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By not attending to any background information on Parks, she is not only positioned as a tired woman and not an activist, but she is read as less human through a lack of description of her personality, interests, and historical achievements—especially compared to the male-centric readings before and after hers. The omission of female backgrounds acts to dehumanize them. By launching directly into the narrative, the reader sees that the action, not the agent, is essential to the biography. It gives the idea that only when the agent is also male should he be studied for his humanity. It also subtly furthers the ideology stated in chapters two and three that males are defined by their accomplishments and intellect. Intersections with Race and Ethnicity The omission of female voices is compounded when examined through the lens of Critical Race Theory. The authors do not just make her flat because she is a woman but because her story challenges the narrative of the chapter, which is that it was the president who signed the bills that put a stop to Jim Crow, not the works of black female activists working together with black male activists like Dr. Martin Luther King. Through master scripting, Parks’ agency as a black female activist is brought under the author’s control before being reinserted into the narrative of the chapter, which depicts racism and civil rights as a historical issue solved by white men, not an ongoing systemic problem. Daly’s story in Benchmark Grade 5 unit 10 exemplifies how females of color are allocated less space in biography and non-fiction than white women, white men, and males of color. As Daly was a scientist, a quick comparison between her descriptions and that of other scientists like Edison makes the disparities clear. Beyond simply having more texts within the corpus that talk about each of these white male scientists is the types of descriptions attributed to white men and the conspicuous absence of detailed reports for female scientists of color such as Marie Daly the only female scientist of color in the 12 textbook corpus. The figure below details one instance of this phenomenon. The adjectives (underlined) used in connection with each scientist and the verbs (bolded) used to depict their work are listed below the name of the scientist from their biographies. There is one descriptive adverb denoted with an asterisk. Likeability Trap and Misogynoir As the figure shows, the adjectives used to describe Edison are not only greater in number than those that describe Daly, but they contain adjectives tied to achievement and intellect. The only time the authors describe female

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Table 4.6 Linguistic Comparison of Edison and Daly Edison

Daly

always thinking of ways to make money from his inventions ideas were practical-simple and useful The greatest inventor loved to read and to learn. Made improvements Was inspired by what he saw nicknamed the Wizard of Menlo Park His fame increased brimmed with great ideas. Curious boy, especially curious

Biochemistry Pioneer research profoundly* changed people’s understanding of how the human body works. Studied the effects; discovered the link

agents positively based on their intelligence throughout the corpus is in the biography genre—and that is only one adjective—“smart.” Zora Neale Hurston is “smart and amusing, and people liked her.” Alicia Menendez wrote about “The Likeability Trap” that women, especially women of color, must navigate to be successful. She found that smart women must also appear likable to negotiate salaries and promotions or take credit for their achievements. But doing these things can make them appear less likable to their male peers. Women, particularly women of color, are more likely to be critiqued for their personality during job performance reviews than men (Menendez, 2019). So, while this is one positive example of a link to intelligence for women of color, it is followed quickly by the paradoxical relationship between intelligence and likeability that is exclusive to women. Menendez’s focus on likability for women of color also points to what Dr. Moya Bailey coined “Misogynoir.” This term describes the racist misogyny that black women experience, particularly in media. It is a portmanteau of the misogyny women encounter and the French word for black—noir-—to specify the intersectionality of the unique violence against Black women. Bailey’s work examines the stereotyping of black women as angry, a harmful trope that victims of misogynoir must counter through workplace likability, such as how Hurston is portrayed in the reading above (Bailey, 2022). Linguistic Suppression Edison is described as the “greatest inventor” and “The Wizard of Menlo Park”; verbs and adverbs depicting Edison demonstrate his fame, that he “brimmed with great ideas,” “was inspired,” was “always thinking,” and “loved to read and learn.” In contrast, the only descriptor given for Dr. Daly

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is “biochemistry pioneer.” The verbs used in her story are not parts of verb phrases, nor are they described with adverbs. She “studied,” and she “discovered.” Her research is personified and credited for how it “profoundly changed” people’s lives. This is suppression of her merits through nominalization. The phrasing around Daly’s accomplishments above uses nominalization as linguistic backgrounding as Daly is mentioned with her actions in other ways such as “study” and “discover,” so inferences must be made that when the author writes that “research” profoundly changed people, that Daly is there too despite the personification of “research.” The 12 books held several references to slavery, human rights, and voting. Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King were described in the fight for civil rights. However, when human rights violations and voting rights violations were mentioned in this series, linguistic suppression through personification was used yet again. An article about voting rights was in the same unit as Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King. Here, such violations were enacted by the states: 1.  “Some states would not let African American men vote. Then some states added poll taxes, while others made people pass tests to vote. By the 1960’s many Americans thought these states were wrong.” Here, the people responsible for not allowing African American men to vote and enacting poll taxes and voting tests are erased from the reading. The white male responsibility for these actions is suppressed, and the burden is placed on “states” instead, which personifies them in place of the white males. However, when the systemic change took place for the better, credit was given to President Johnson for signing the Voting Rights Act. Interestingly, it was Johnson and not the Voting Rights Act that acted on the injustices of the day. Despite the earlier readings about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, the credit is given to a white male by name when positive change occurs. The authors used linguistic suppression and nominalization to erase people of color’s contributions and the responsibilities of white men for human rights violations. The authors avoided naming either the states or the governors that enacted these racist laws or the people who stood outside polling places intimidating voters but did not feel the same pressure to suppress the positive work of Lyndon Johnson the way the author hid the work of Rosa Parks earlier in the same unit. Added to the double standard is the desire to credit Lyndon Johnson’s contributions in this piece but not in naming activists who played a vital role in this effort. This further marginalizes the minority voices in their own ethnic and racial histories, making them seem passive observers

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instead of active agents of change while simultaneously downplaying the dangerous role of white supremacists in the Civil Rights movement. The minimization of female perspectives was an issue that affected female stories regardless of ethnicity. More active background descriptions were present in male stories, regardless of ethnicity, suggesting a purposeful attempt by the publishers to honor the lives of African American men with the same space as is given to white men—at least in this chapter on voting rights and civil rights. A review of the top gendered nouns by genre in Table 4.1 shows that white male names top the list in biography. “King” refers to a male royal and to Martin Luther King Jr. at 9 in the top 10 list of gendered nouns. So, while in this chapter, background information is given the same space for male historical figures regardless of ethnicity, the genre is still overwhelmingly white and male. This means that when gender and ethnicity intersect with women of color, they are marginalized disproportionately through vague, absent, or misleading representations compared to men of color and white people, a symptom of misogynoir. White Injury Narratives Secondly, considering the top 10 lists for each corpus again, OOWTE demonstrates more names of color—Francisco Pizarro (and a second Francisco, a child in Quang’s story), Hernando de Soto, and Quang, a child describing his culture to Francisco. It is unfortunate that with the frequency of people of color in this corpus, none of these people of color are female, and second, these people are either children—as in Quang and Francisco, who may or may not be contrived for the textbook series—or infamous as in Pizarro and de Soto. Readers learn that they were conquistadors who arrived in Cuzco in the 1500s, “killed” the Incan ruler, and “made slaves” of the Incan people. De Soto and Pizarro are the only historical figures of color frequently recurring in the OOWTE series. This assumes that people of color did not fully contribute positively to world history. Or, those that did contribute contributed negatively—they were villains. This is not to say this is the only time people of color were discussed historically in OOWTE. But these figures were frequent enough to make the top 10 list for gendered nouns. This trope is common in white nationalist ideologies as part of the white injury narrative that casts white people as victims and immigrants as villains/ perpetrators (Bloch, Taylor, and Martinez, 2020). People of color, especially “foreigners” of color, steal white jobs, rape women, and traffic drugs and children. In the words of former president Donald Trump: 2.  “They are animals” from “shithole countries” “this isn’t an innocent group of people. It’s a large number of people that are tough. They’ve

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injured, they’ve attacked, and the Mexican police and military have actually suffered.” (Scott, 2019). Thus, by predominantly showing people of color in history as men who kill and enslave, these texts do nothing to counter the harmful tropes that are a part of the national political rhetoric of the US that has been a part of how people of color have been viewed since the reconstruction era post-Civil War. Just above this short reading on Spanish conquistadors in the Andes is a reading about the Aztec people, which mentions Cortes. The reader learns that the Aztecs were part of a “warring culture.” That they created their empire by fighting and defeating enemies; then, the reader learns that Cortes’ soldiers “destroyed” the Aztecs’ city. These terms reveal a Eurocentric and ethnocentric representation of the Aztec peoples, which commonly characterized Europeans as discoverers and indigenous peoples as barbarians or primitive and unable to think logically or philosophically. However, this is not an accurate description of the Aztecs. Work from Cultural Anthropology demonstrates that Pre-Columbian societies contained persons who reflected systematically upon the nature of reality, human existence, knowledge, proper conduct, and goodness. Nahua civilizations such as the Aztecs included tlamatinime (“knowers of things,” “sages,” or “philosophers”; (Maffie, 2015). Not only does the corpus minimize women’s perspectives through vague, absent, and misleading characterizations, but the corpus also reveals a Eurocentric representation of the most frequent historical peoples of color in OOWTE, which erases indigenous people’s perspectives from the texts and positions non-white historical figures as villains. This is not to excuse any of the villainous actions of Cortes and de Soto. They are not people to be celebrated. The series shows most frequently one perspective of non-whites in history within the OOWTE corpus—as villains who conquered barbarians. This supports the white nationalist ideologies present in 21st-century US political rhetoric. Patriarchal Buttressing Parks’ non-fiction story above is an example of the second theme of unequal representation within non-fiction. Namely, that female stories are shared with male characters, but male stories can stand alone. While this phenomenon has been described in literary and historical contexts, as I will discuss below, it has yet to be given a name. Thus, I will refer to this phenomenon as patriarchal buttressing. The term “buttress” is a multifaceted term that can refer to a person looked to or depended on for support, but it can also refer to a means of restraint or control (Merriam-Webster). Thus, when female stories are not allowed to

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stand on their own merits but must be buttressed by male figures as a means of support or corroboration for these merits of the female protagonists, this is patriarchal buttressing. Rosa Parks had to share her story with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was given greater coverage in words and details. This shows up again with the reading “Mrs. Stowe and the President” (Grade 5 unit 1). Harriett Beecher Stowe’s legacy as the writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is shared with a description of President Lincoln and his interaction with her. The reader only sees President Lincoln’s impressions of her: “She seemed somewhat shy and short.” Then Lincoln is quoted as greeting her by calling her “ . . . the little woman who wrote the book. . . . ” The author described her reaction by writing, “Mrs. Stowe blushed.” The reader does not get to know Mrs. Stowe’s thoughts on President Lincoln. The reader does not get to read Stowe’s voice in the story written about her. She must share her story with a male; her thoughts and voice are absent, and the language the male uses is physically demeaning. Instead of learning about her literary contributions and investigative journalism, readers are told how small she is and that she is shy—a stereotype for female gentility during the 1800s and the virtue of white women in Fundamental Christianity as a world religion until today. The Male Gaze The positioning of Stowe is constructed through the lens of President Lincoln in a way that is objectifying—another example of the male gaze described in chapter two. The male gaze became popularized through feminist film critique in the 1970s but has been broadened to not only include the ways that films view women through the eyes of males but ways in which other media genres view women through male eyes that empower males while sexualizing or diminishing females. The male gaze, discussed in chapter two, depicts women as supporting roles, sometimes within their own stories. This is accomplished in written genres through descriptions of female bodies given by men, descriptions of female emotions (i.e., a woman has a hissy fit, while a man has a fit of rage) that act to diminish them physically, emotionally, and in the case of this story—historically. Not only does the writer of this story give the reader President Lincoln’s perspective of Stowe, but the writer includes narration from Lincoln on Stowe’s diminutive size and demure characteristics. Another aspect of the male gaze is that women are conditioned to conform to supporting roles through patriarchal pressures. The reader sees what the writer describes as the “blushed” face of Mrs. Stowe after being called “the little woman,” showing a diminutive and conforming response to Lincoln’s characterization of her.

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Other biographies or non-fiction stories where women had to share their stories with or have their stories told by males were Margaret Knight’s biography in OOWTE Grade 5, where she shares her biography with both the man who sued her for the copyright of her invention—Charles Annan, and a fellow inventor William Deubner. In a one-page recounting of Dolores Huerta’s contributions to the labor movement, her connection to her father and Cesar Chavez is made, including a picture of Chavez speaking attached to her biography. This phenomenon of patriarchal buttressing was the most frequently seen in the corpus within biography and non-fiction genres. Feminist Theory Patriarchal buttressing is frequent in patriarchal literature that decrees that the male is the head of the household. This sociological ideology explains that females and children within the male’s home primarily depend on the male. Simone de Beauvoir, existentialist philosopher and author of The Second Sex (1949) describes how myths imply a subject who projects their hopes and dreams toward transcendence. But women do not set themselves up as “subject” and have no myth in which their projects are fully reflected. They “still dream through the dreams of men” (302). Even the roles of men, as seen through the eyes of females, are roles created by men—such as a jealous lover or a wayward son. But “woman is defined exclusively in her relation to man.” (302). This is what is seen repeatedly in both corpora, as exemplified above, which I call patriarchal buttressing. Dr. Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics (1970), who established the term “patriarchy” to account for the subjugation of women, describes how males always have their “manhood” to fall back on should their vanity be offended by a woman of wealth or education, sometimes through the contemplation of violent methods of reasserting dominance. Thus, the sexual hierarchy is re-affirmed and mobilized in literature to “punish” the wealthy, educated, and successful female should she overstep the bounds of her diminutive place. In higher classes, men are less likely to assert a blunt patriarchal dominance, as men enjoy higher class status and have more power than females in the same economic or educational class. This bares much resemblance to the power dynamics at play in “Mrs. Stowe and the President” described above, where President Lincoln more subtly demeans Stowe, perhaps because of his higher class status. So, while women can transcend the usual class stratifications, in patriarchal societies, “good” women must still defer to men, which could account for patriarchal buttressing (Millett, 1970). In the story with Lincoln and Stowe, a reader with member resources would understand the pressure her journalistic endeavors

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and writings put on Lincoln to act, thus Lincoln asserting his sexual hierarchy and putting her back in her diminutive place as a “little woman.” Intersections with Race and Ethnicity Patriarchal buttressing is compounded at the intersection of ethnicity. Not only are female voices muted as they must share their own stories with males, but with a majority white male genre, minority female voices are even rarer. Their stories are muted and pushed to the genre’s periphery because of misogynoir, the anti-black misogyny within patriarchal buttressing in the text (Bailey, 2022). The gendered nouns for biography and non-fiction do not contain women of color in the Benchmark series. Two females of color in OOWTE made the top 10 list. Lourdes is an immigrant from Cuba who explains her rationale for becoming a US citizen. Her story of immigration and citizenship does stand on its own without connection to a male figure. Carlota is an Hispanic American child visiting a historical site in Texas. Her learning experience is shared with the male guide, who is presented in photography as Hispanic American while never named. In the few biographies that feature famous people of color, most came from the Benchmark corpus, such as Dolores Huerta. She shares her story with her father and Cesar Chavez. Earlier in the same corpus, Chavez is described for his activism, and credit is given to him alone for improving the lives of farm workers. Yet Huerta’s activism cannot stand alone without the support of Chavez for her work in an article entitled “Dolores Huerta.” Which mentions that she co-founded the United Farmworkers Union with Chavez. While Millett and others claim that sexual dominion obtains “the most pervasive ideology of our culture” (338), she also equates the racial caste system, which subsumes class, with the caste of virility that triumphs over the social status of wealth and well-educated women (Millett, 1970). In this way, women of color in literature, like Dolores Huerta, must submit not only to the caste of virility in sharing their achievements with males but also to the racial caste system, which through lack of ethnic representation in either corpus, was present. This suggests that the textbooks exist within this racial caste system and the caste of virility but are only superficially challenging misogynoir within the texts. To share Huerta’s story is to challenge the most patriarchal and white nationalist views of women of color, but the position of the text here is of her dreaming, as Beauvoir says, “through the dreams of men” (1949).

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Weak Women Helen Keller is the only female to be described in multiple textbooks. She is in Grade 1 and 2 of Benchmark. However, her accomplishments were not mentioned in either biography. Her physical disabilities were named in both texts. Her two biographies were less than three paragraphs in total, where her name appears in the corpus four times. Her physical disabilities are mentioned in both stories, where the reader learns that she was deaf and blind because she became ill. The book defines deafness and blindness here too. However, despite the author’s effort to make her abilities clear to the reader, the language surrounding her achievements are opaque. She “helped” improve life for people with special needs and “aided” those with special needs. One article in the series where she is mentioned is part of more extensive work on multiple individuals responsible for contributing in extraordinary ways to society. Thus, her story contrasts with the one before it. Frederick Douglass “worked together” to free enslaved people. Cesar Chavez “won” rights for farm workers. A look at the verbs allocated to each person indicates the positions given to them. Within her story, she is positioned first as someone with a disability and second as a helper for someone else, a patriarchal role commonly assigned to women in society. Douglass and Chavez work and win, both roles assigned to males in a patriarchal society. The author makes choices that place the token female in this story and the multiple males into distinct gender role boxes that conform to patriarchal ideologies about gender. While the focus for Keller is on her disability, the male agents in the same reading are only known for their contributions. This furthers the connection from chapter two on intelligence and males. Keller’s story is not unique in its focus on the character’s obstacles over her contributions. Intersections with Ethnicity Sacagawea was also primarily reported alongside her lack with a story about her inability to translate for the Nez Perce, as referenced in chapter two. There were examples of men of color and their contributions, as referenced earlier alongside Helen Keller. Cesar Chavez is described in the heroes’ story and again in reading about Dolores Huerta. Frederick Douglass is also described. In each of these stories, their contributions are in greater focus than the females in the same reading. Females of color are marginalized when sharing their stories with male figures, as in Rosa Parks sharing her story with Dr. Martin Luther King. Male figures fill multiple times the amount of space as female figures, such as how often Edison’s life is displayed in three textbooks. Females of color receive fewer mentions for their work than even white female writers, such as Hurston’s one biographical tag in the 12-book corpus.

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There is a disconnect between women of color’s lived experiences and their accomplishments, such as the positioning of Rosa Parks as a tired African American woman on a bus who had little idea her refusal to give up her seat would promote change instead of a leader in the NAACP and WPA who made a conscious decision that started a movement that changed the fabric of the United States going forward. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I first focused on how corpus analytical tools can be used as a part of Fairclough’s Framework for Critical Discourse Analysis for textual analysis at the first stage—Description. Then, I demonstrated how Gee’s tools for discourse analysis could be used to analyze genre through Fairclough’s second stage of interpretations, drawing on theories from outside linguistics for appropriate modeling of genre analysis. Finally, I presented an in-depth look at the genre within these corpora that were most to blame for hegemonic representations of gender and its intersections with ethnicity—non-fiction/ biography, focusing on feminist theories and CRT for analysis. In this next chapter, I will focus on the final stage of Fairclough’s framework—explanation. I will use Janks’ Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy as a lens for explaining the themes presented in the previous chapters regarding access, design, and diversity. Alongside Critical Literacy, I will describe and apply Anya’s multifaceted materials analysis protocol for pursuing anti-racist world language curricula grounded in Critical Race Pedagogy.

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Engaging Critical Literacy

INTRODUCTION In this concluding chapter, the third stage of Fairclough’s Framework for CDA—explanation—will be explored through the lens of Janks’ Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy (CL). This third stage extends the work done in chapters two and three, analyzing humans and non-humans linguistically through stages one and two of Fairclough’s Framework. This chapter will also delve deeper into Anya’s “Language Program Materials Analysis for Antiracist, Equity-Minded, and Inclusive Practices.” After a review of key terminology, this chapter will focus on explanation through inquiry and self-assessment using CRP and CL and conclude with action plans building on Anya’s and Janks’ toolkits for CRP and CL, respectively. This will provide a path forward for critical educational linguists, curriculum reviewers, and stakeholders in the textbook adoption process. In the appendix to follow, sample lessons applying CDA, Critical Race Pedagogy, and Critical Literacy are presented to classroom educators to reconstruct the texts for more egalitarian learning environments. Key Terms Explanation The explanation determines how discourse is part of a social process and practice determined by social structures and what effects these discourses can have on these structures. Fairclough provides three questions that should be asked at this stage of CDA. First, it asks about power relations at situational (we shall say interpersonal/classroom), institutional (school/community) and societal (state/national/international) levels. At various points in this text, I 95

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have mentioned my member resources or my background knowledge that I have used to help me understand the text in a way that those without my same background knowledge would not, such as reading a text about Helen Keller that says she “helped” people with disabilities but only mentions what her disabilities were and not her accomplishments and service. I bring my member resources to fill in the gaps in the text. Explanation asks, what members’ resources (or lack thereof) are ideological? Namely, what member resources does the text assume I have that could be shaped by an ideology? For example, in discussing Yeh-Shen earlier in the text, I discussed the use of “naturally, they lived happily ever after” and how that assumes member resources in the Disney versions of fairy tales and assumes normality when a member of royalty wants to marry a servant for her looks. This is driven by a patriarchal ideology that says real men take care of their wives financially, that women need to be taken care of, and that her main responsibility is to remain beautiful and attractively dressed. Thirdly, how do these two series and their themes gleaned from the interpretation stage position them at these three locations—situation, institution, and society? For example, do these texts normalize or transform existing power relationships? Do they examine the struggles in these environments creatively, overtly, and critically, or do they ignore them to present an idealized reality? (Fairclough, 2015). Critical Pedagogy Paulo Freire believed that educational systems in much of the world produced patriotic workers—citizens who unquestioningly prop up the powerful. Critical pedagogy insists on critical thinking to produce critical consciousness, which leads to transformative action within the students’ worlds (Freire, 2005). Critical Pedagogy goes by other names, such as liberatory pedagogy, empowering pedagogy, radical pedagogy, progressive pedagogy, or pedagogy of possibility, hope, and love. It has roots in feminism and cultural studies. Critical Literacy as Critical Pedagogy Freire defines critical literacy (CL) as a vehicle that can aid educators and students to think critically, challenge the norms of society that may influence them, stop marginalization, and acknowledge the privilege that comes with English and other dominant ways of being. Under this vehicle, Students’ literacy experiences place them in the position of decision-makers instead of as passive vessels (Freire, 2005). A significant goal of CL is preparing and equipping learners to frame the world through questioning, deconstructing, critiquing, and reconstructing texts through reformation (Canagarajah, 2000).

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One prominent researcher in the field of Critical Literacy whose contributions to the area I lean on in my analysis of discursive positions of gender is Dr. Hillary Janks. There are four elements to Janks’ interdependent model of critical literacy: domination, access, diversity, and design (Janks, 2010). I chose to work within her theory mainly to examine the text in the explanation phase of Fairclough’s Framework for CDA because it provides a concise framework to uncover issues of subjugation through domination by influential circles in each culture. A secondary trait of this theory is that it helps educators design alternatives to traditional worldviews so that they may better enact social justice reform— this is the design strand of her approach. Janks’ theory worked well within the explanation phase as her theory contains three strands with which to filter the text using an understanding of her meanings—domination, access, and diversity. I employed this theory to explain the linguistic suppression and exclusion of female characters’ voices and of marginalized people groups’ accomplishments related to social power in terms of gender identity. This played a key role in discovering the extent to which the use of silenced and excluded voices in a text may be manipulated to legitimate the dominant discourses and their power concerning women and people of color. Critical Race Pedagogy Jennings and Lynn designed a pedagogical framework for examining systemic racism within education called Critical Race Pedagogy. CRP recognizes the endemic and complex nature of racism in education and identifies the culture of power that disenfranchises students of color by reproducing racial hierarchies. CRP also acknowledges the role of reflexivity in the classroom to resist “othering” to examine multiple expressive societal structures. Finally, CRP recognizes the necessity of a liberatory form of teaching and learning as opposed to an apolitical form that seeks only to present the facts (Jennings and Lynn, 2005). Within education, CRT and Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) explore how racial injustices are perpetuated in the classroom, educational policies, and educational materials to propose solutions. This theory posits that racism is interwoven with all academic instruction (Anya, 2021a). CRT sees the official school curriculum as a socially constructed artifact that maintains a white supremacist ideology. For example, historically, school curricula silence multiple voices and only legitimize male white Anglo-Saxon protestant perspectives and name them as “standard” or “canonical” (Swartz, 1992). A supplementary file within Anya’s 2021 paper on Critical Race Pedagogy is her “Language Program Materials Analysis for Antiracist, Equity-Minded,

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Inclusive Practices.” She developed this materials analysis protocol for language program professionals to examine their own language curricula to determine the extent of antiracist, inclusive, and equity-minded materials are in use in their programs. It includes processes of inquiry, self-assessment, and planning to modify existing materials to increase their resourcefulness in inclusivity and equity in the classroom. She divides the inquiries into four categories, which occasionally mirror and often push the limits of the Janks’ four interdependent strands of CL. They are: representation, inclusivity, empowerment, and culturally responsive practices. To respond to these final research questions, the following sections toggle back and forth between Janks’ interdependent weaving of domination, access, and diversity and Anya’s representation, inclusivity, empowerment, and culturally responsive practices. ANALYSIS Power Relations Janks’ theory explores domination through language as a means of preserving and reproducing controlling relationships with the disempowered. Readers should ask whose interests are served within the texts and who is empowered or disempowered (Janks, 2010). Chapters two through four established that in California Benchmark Advance, female accomplishments are concealed frequently, “thingifying” is standard, and authors unnecessarily fragment males and females into groups by sex. Linguistic Occupational Stereotyping, gendered hyponymy, and patriarchal buttressing were also often used for male characters within this series, as addressed in chapter four. The combination of these issues legitimates ideologies that give power to white men. When texts use markedness to “other” certain groups, this establishes a norm through a linguistically unmarked form. Authority is granted when discourses present the dominant (unmarked) forms as the default and other more diverse forms as “other” (Janks, 2010). Power was allocated quite differently in On Our Way to English, Texas series, which gave students access to multiple hybrid identities—identities in which they learn to be comfortable in several different discourses outside the stereotypes and norms for sex. I saw multiple clear examples of strong female protagonists, particularly female children who displayed strength of character in overcoming obstacles. The caveat is that females were presented as having obstacles due to their own weaknesses, such as those presented in chapter three with Beetle and Snail. In contrast, males were presented as having more strengths inherent in their masculinity, such as intelligence and size. In this series, cooperative femininity was also offered as an identity, as was

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aggressive masculinity. This was counterbalanced with domestic fatherhood, which presented fathers as “mothers’ bumbling assistants” as communicated in chapter two and coined in Sunderland, 2000. In this next section, I will look at how these identities are enacted in the texts that do provide greater gender fluidity. Strong Female Protagonist This series has multiple notable examples in each grade level of strong female leads. From Asian females in grunge to Indian females in pajamas riding dragons, this series contained more minority characters in non-stereotypical roles. The language surrounding these characters normalizes her choices. Even stories about adult topics like the Revolutionary War were presented by children, giving their perspectives. These females interact with male characters cooperatively yet maintain similar statuses linguistically. The caveat to this is that for every unit that contained one strong female protagonist, there were three or more male protagonists, which I will discuss in greater detail below. Additionally, females display multiple identities that make them more palatable within a patriarchal society, such as the blushing Mrs. Stowe described in chapter four. The female Asian student wearing grunge is taking care of a baby lizard, displaying matriarchal traits. The Indian child in pajamas riding a dragon is riding with a large mustached male knight while wearing pink heart print pjs, which tips the balance into a more benevolent patriarchal tale. And female children experiencing the Revolutionary War champion and glorify war, a patriarchal stance that pre-dates the 1970s and the anti-war movement in the USA. Domestic Father In this series, while traditional heteronormative family values are predominant, there are multiple attempts at exemplifying males in domestic roles, such as baking or cooking dinner, childcare, putting children to bed, playing with children, and being active in chores, among others. Just as strong females exist in each grade level, there are examples of males acting in domestic domains in each grade level text. These males still maintained status through adornment, wearing ties and dress clothes, giving the impression that they had just come in from work to care for the family. This again makes the deviation from the normative behavior for males more palatable to a patriarchal societal structure that wishes to position males as head of household and breadwinners.

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Aggressive Male Competitive play for male characters is seen to a lesser extent but is still aptly present in this series. One notable example is from “Mean Dean” in Grade 2. He says, 1.  “As a rule, I never hit back.” The dependent clause in the first position insinuates that the decision NOT to use fists in play is a moral decision this child has made, which encapsulates that a precedent exists for boys to use fists in play. It insinuates that withholding physical violence is not the norm. The negative word “never” also indicates that he has been in this situation before, again playing into the idea of precedent for this violent behavior. This story nods to the ideology that “boys will be boys,” which provides increased freedom for boys to misbehave socially. This type of language between males happens again in Grade 3, with two boys discussing dogs in the park. First, Ben says that dogs love water. 2.  “Jack: ‘They all love water? Every single dog in the world? Have you checked out every single dog, Ben? Are you sure you didn’t miss one, hiding behind a tree up on a mountain somewhere?’ Ben: ‘One, two, three, four. I get four questions, all for one little statement about dogs. Jack: Is that right? Are you positive? Absolutely sure? What if you counted wrong? Ben: Yes, I’m sure. And that’s another four questions.’ Jack: ‘So? Is there something wrong with that? Does it annoy you? Huh?’”

This is another example of aggressive language used by male characters in this series that plays into the theme of masculine aggression. Historically in the US, females are discouraged from this language, as it makes females less likable, as discussed in chapter four (Menendez, 2019). The fact that it is only seen in male-to-male dialogue does suggest that it is a discourse only available to males, leaving females without access to this powerful discourse. Differences in identity and power affect who has the right to speak, who is listened to when they speak, who has the right to act, and who is noticed when they do. This aggressive discourse gives power to males. The story ends with a description of the boys tussling in the grass, laughing at the aggressive language thrown at one another. The reaction shapes the decisions about

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whose language is appropriate and inappropriate. The exchange demonstrates that this antagonistic talk is appropriate between boys. Cooperative Outspoken Female Another female identity constructed was the inactive female who stays home while males go out and have adventures, such as in many of the animal stories discussed in chapter three. However, females in this series are more likely to be in a narrator position, giving them a voice to give their perspectives on a variety of topics, from moving, what it is like to be a migrant farmer, the Oregon Trail, and other stories of overcoming hardships as a family. These female characters use primarily inclusive cooperative language, more common in female narration. Language in these scenes constructs a position for females as cooperative and supportive but on the periphery of life within their stories. This power, without access to the dominant discourse, maintains the exclusionary force of those dominant discourses. When characters narrate what others do and give their sometimes-unspoken thoughts and feelings, this shows how the characters see the world—as a bystander watching others’ stories unfold through their narrative presentation of others’ behaviors. This constructs this character as less potent than the protagonists in the story. This cooperative discourse for female speakers maintains the exclusionary force of the males’ dominant aggressive/competitive discourses. Even in stories where females go out with their families and have adventures, their active voices are not present or are muted through inclusive language. They are not given full autonomy for their own actions. The OOWTE Grade 4 textbook tells a powerful story of immigration to the USA from Germany in the 1800s from a son’s perspective. His mother and sister are part of this story, but only through inclusive language: “we” is used 5 times, “our” is used 3 times, and “us” is used once. This removes the female immigrant voice from the story in favor of the male’s perspective on how his mother and sister deal with immigration. Power and the Cooperative Female Within Janks’ Interdependent theory, there is a distinction made between positive and negative power. Power can be used to benefit some and to disadvantage others. In these female cooperation stories, the narrator is constructed as peripheral to her family’s adventure; the power and status given to her male family members are used to benefit her. So, though this position is constructed for her, it is not “bad” in the story. These examples teach language learners respect for migrants and immigrants and the value of diversity and difference. The top dogs are not just males but often parents and siblings. They have power over the underdogs, who are not just females, but daughters

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and sisters. This power relation defends the underdog while promoting character development lessons around obedience and parental respect. Empowerment Anya’s Framework defines empowerment as materials that promote awareness, responsibility, and agency for equity. This definition goes beyond identifying the powerful and powerless within the text and naming the types of power at work. Discrimination, Racism, and Marginalization Benchmark attempts to engage the reader in conversations about racism and bigotry. While Harriet Tubman’s story is told through the lens of an enslaved male child, this explicit language about slavery and the Underground Railroad provides space for discussing the United States’ history of slavery and discrimination. Though further information about the Underground Railroad is filtered through the eyes of Levi Coffin—a white man—Benchmark repeatedly attempts to provide space for meaningful discussions about systemic racism, such as The Dred Scott Decision, with an emphasis on Thurgood Marshall’s role. Wong Ming-Chung’s mining diary entries allow space for conversations about the historical marginalization of immigrants. The area where this text can improve in empowering these discussions is not to treat them as if they are entirely solved in the past and to ask pointed questions to do more than give space in the text but to insist upon critical dialogue. To empower readers, the textbooks need to generate awareness of the current-day systemic racism and current marginalized racial and ethnic groups living in the USA. Additionally, these texts downplay the roles dominant groups played in historical events, such as personifying “states” suppressing voters to avoid blaming members of the Ku Klux Klan for intimidating African American voters at voting booths during the Civil Rights Movement, as is discussed in chapter four. But this series had no problem naming white males who played positive roles in the Civil Rights Era. Educators must recognize this as the privileging of dominant groups even within what appear to be counternarratives. This series can improve in this area by naming the opponents of Civil Rights and giving credit to Black activists during and since this time, again showing that the pursuit of equality is not finished but is ongoing. OOWTE does not contain explicit opportunities for constructive race, racism, or marginalization discussions. This series does present counternarratives about immigrants’ motives and lived experiences, both past and present. However, these stories do not explicitly attempt to question or discuss misconceptions prevalent among dominant groups in the USA about immigration

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from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Educators need to use these stories to foster discussions that push back the dominant culture and hateful assumptions. This series could improve in this area by providing more questions for conversation and reflection on students’ lived experiences and those of their families and communities within the classroom. Assumptions about Culture, Intelligence, Class, and Language Questioned OOWTE does include a broader range of characters from Latin and South America and Asia, as well as minority female characters at a higher rate than Benchmark. OOWTE contains examples of counternarratives from the voice of minority characters, including the use of minority languages within the text. These personal narratives provide opportunities implicitly to challenge dominant assumptions—an example of Kiran Shah as a restaurant owner could be used to question assumptions about social class and entrepreneurship. Quang’s narrative containing the Vietnamese language could be used to examine language status or varieties. Miguel’s story about medicine from the rainforest could be used to question knowledge and intelligence concerning western medicine and to engage in family funds of knowledge on the topic. But, none of these is written for this purpose because there is no dialogue before or after to encourage constructive discussions. Educators need to be empowered outside of the text to address marginalization. Benchmark does offer opportunities for questioning ability with two stories about Helen Keller, though the focus is more on her lack than on her overcoming. While Sacagawea’s accomplishments are minimized within the text, the focus on her language abilities on Lewis and Clark’s behalf opens the door to discussions about language varieties. The refusal to discuss indigenous peoples’ systemic oppression despite including indigenous stories in the series is striking compared to the explicit attempts to discuss civil rights and slavery within African American history in Benchmark. In each of these areas, making explicit the systems that oppress these peoples and asking targeted questions to begin the conversation and allow for student reflection are needed. Stereotypes about Minoritized Women Rejected In Benchmark, there are stereotyped stories with assumptions about women and minoritized groups that disempower women of color. The appearance of a headdress on male and female characters in the indigenous folktale from the Algonquin tribe is one glaring example of ethnic stereotyping in this series, as mentioned in chapter four. Adjectives of size describe women as “fairylike” and men as “enormous.” They are depicted according to White AngloSaxon Protestant values, promoting multiple stereotypes about femininity and

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masculinity as well as normalizing dominant ways of being. While both series provide examples of women of color who overcome adversity to accomplish greatness, such as Marie M. Daly, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sacagawea, they are unbalanced with male-centric stories and stories of domestic femininity. Anya’s framework asks the analyst to consider whether materials empower the reader to address or reduce inequity. Benchmark brings up issues of racism, discrimination, and marginalization of women and people of color, which allows for discussions of injustice in history. The educator would need to take this discussion further to address students’ experiences with inequity and marginalization and make comparisons, providing language support that empowers students to produce language in ways like the protagonists to promote positive change in the school and community. Diversity This term could appear self-explanatory but is quite nuanced. Within Janks’ interdependent framework, diversity is not only racial or cultural but also linguistic, or “ways with words” as anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath articulates it (1983). It encapsulates variety in the ways of reading and writing in a range of modalities, a wide range of social identities, and diverse social institutions to be inclusive of students’ various languages and literacies. In this section, I will pull from previous chapters to summarize the role of diversity in gender and later ethnicity, though, in this strand, the two are much more intertwined than in the power strand. I draw again on Anya’s protocol which asks for representation and inclusivity. This goes further than Janks’ diversity in affirming authentic and meaningful expression. To begin with diversity and inclusivity, I first noticed that there are six units within the Benchmark (60 unit) series that feature males only. This equates to over half of one book in the series devoted to males only. In Benchmark, units on social studies, history, and science tokenize sex while adhering to a white male supremacist ideology that equates heroism, patriotism, and war to masculinity, as discussed in chapters two and four. One unit in the Grade 5 Benchmark text is on American wars. The unit begins with excerpts from Joseph Plumb Martin’s diary during the Revolutionary War—his story is retold in a non-fiction piece later in this unit. This is followed by historical retellings of Patrick Henry and George Washington’s role in the writing of the constitution. Then, a non-fiction piece mingles the Revolutionary War with the Civil War and the Iraq War. The unit continues with letters from men on the battlefields to their wives and sisters at home. An excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage talks about a young man on the battlefield during the Civil War. In all this focus on the greatness of war, the enactment of violent masculinity is normalized.

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The idea of the US male providing “protection” is perceived as masculine and supports hegemonic notions of masculinity and white supremacy, especially when bringing the Iraq War into this reading scheme of wars as “great.” Throughout US history, white supremacy has been more closely aligned with the aftermath of war than social class. US wars have long been depicted as righteous, even in depictions of violence through film (Belew, 2018). Through a unit devoid of female presence and focused on the glorification of war, both hegemonic masculinity and white supremacy can exist. Throughout this unit, the reader sees white male after white male being exalted as a war hero. This glorification of white men at war harkens back to the “law and order” politics of the Reagan Administration in the USA—coded language for racist ideologies that led to the mass incarceration of minorities and mass deportation of immigrants. The “law and order” should only be enacted by white men, a persistent ideology of conservatives in the USA today (Macias Rojas, 2018; Du Mez, 2020) However, there is one short reading on Deborah Sampson. It shows her portrait and a statue of her in poor lighting, making it difficult to make out her likeness. The reading glosses over her reason for posing as a male to fight in the Revolutionary War. It focuses instead on her injuries, discharge, and later work as an educator, thus tokenizing her in this unit and divorcing the text from the struggles of females during this period to be taken seriously in traditionally male-only spheres. Additionally, with the focus on her injuries and discharge and only two words written about her work in the militia— “performed bravely” (par 2, p114)—this diminished her accomplishments, a consistent theme in this series for female characters. This theme carries into Helen Keller’s biographies as well. In Grades 1 and 2, Helen Keller is described, but her illness and her subsequent disabilities are the focus of each reading. As discussed in chapter four, there is no mention in either text of her exact accomplishments. However, in the same unit, we learn about Garrett Morgan, Jim Henson, Sequoyah, Frederick Douglass, and Cesar Chavez. For each of these people, we learn what they accomplished. Again, the female historical representative for the unit is peripheral, exotic, and unaccomplished compared to all the males described. The focus is on her obstacles and perceived weaknesses with no regard to her impact on her community or recognition of the marginalization of females, particularly females from these communities during that period. In both examples, work is done to position the reader regarding gender in US history. In each reading, the themes regarding male victory position the reader to see competitiveness and violence as normal and positive. Focusing on Sampson’s injuries and discharge from military service and on Keller’s illness and handicaps positions the reader to believe that females are not a part of this pro-competitive group. The emphasis on their injuries, illness, and

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handicaps, and in Sampson’s case, her movement from the military into education, sends a message that competitiveness and social justice are masculine traits. There are more appropriate positions for females, like teaching. This creates a dichotomy—a male and female box lacking in authentic diversity. The texts perpetuate gender essentialism, a widely held belief in Christian fundamentalist homes and reflected in right-wing news media and by contemporary conservative politicians in the US (Wolgemuth, 2018). It is that males and females are born with distinctively different natures, which are predetermined biologically and determine strengths and weaknesses for certain activities (Du Mez, 2020). Through the patterns discussed in chapters two, three, and four, where men go out, and women stay home (or go home), females are cooperative in problem-solving and within social interactions where males are aggressive and competitive. Males are strong and intelligent, while females are small, dainty, and weak in numerous ways; the gender essentialist ideology is supported and perpetuated. While there is the occasional story that subverts stereotypical femininity, it is both tokenized and, in other ways, still conforms to patriarchy. This overarching lack of gender diversity thus maintains the exclusionary force of patriarchal discourse and loses the opportunities for contestation and change. Inclusivity Appears Natural and Accurate, Not a PC Attempt Examining the texts through a CRP lens, I found that when Benchmark’s curriculum contains gender or ethnic diversity, it is done in the way Soñia Nieto describes as the “Holidays and Heroes” approach. When a curriculum takes bits and pieces of a dominated group’s culture and places them at the periphery of the curriculum, it trivializes them by separating them from their diverse cultures and histories, tokenizing them within the text as an exotic “other” (Nieto, 1996). Contemporary CRP applied linguistics research has also noted this in US-based foreign language texts. This is an example of “liberal multiculturalism” that reduces complex identities and hierarchical relations to superficial banality, like “celebrating diversity” through ethnic foods and festivals (Anya, 2021a,b). While there are certainly examples of ethnic foods and festivals in children’s narratives in OOWTE, there are also examples that balance this PC attempt throughout the series by providing greater access to cultural folktales, albeit not adequately cited and occasionally misrepresented in imagery. The result in the Texas series is the appearance of inclusivity as natural. Where both series miss the mark is in accuracy. Stereotypes mentioned in the section above lend to inaccurate representations of indigenous peoples in both series. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant naming and clothing choices on characters,

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regardless of culture or heritage, were missed opportunities to legitimize the lived experiences of ethnic groups in both series.\ Minorities Are Legitimate Speakers, Teachers, and Learners In Benchmark, the units on Civil Rights push African American characters into the front of the text, showing them as legitimate native speakers of English. As introduced in chapter four, three short stories feature African Americans outside of Civil Rights issues. In a 12-paragraph article on Marie M. Daly, a chemist, her name was not mentioned after the fourth paragraph; instead, her research took center stage. Two readings about authors of color— Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes—position people of color as language creators. OOWTE provides multiple readings from the perspectives of migrant children, immigrant children, and children living in other countries providing readers with opportunities to see minorities as teachers and learners of English. This is an area of diversity in which both series do quite well. For example, representing a variety of characters in short readings on topics such as space travel, readers see males and females, Asian Americans, and African Americans as astronauts in an OOWTE reading. Family stories of migration show adults in various occupations participating in work and government. However, there was extraordinarily little focus consciously on color in affirming ways. Just as female characters had to transcend their smallness and weakness, African Americans and Latinx had to transcend their language barriers, their skin colors, and their social status to accomplish greatness in many stories, especially in Benchmark, which focused on African American activists during the Civil Rights era and OOWTE which had a focus on Latinx immigration and migrant workers’ rights. The protagonists in these readings were one-dimensional, as there was little description of their upbringing, their work outside of activism, their hobbies, or their family life. This contrasts starkly with the equating of greatness and masculinity, power and whiteness that were normative in these texts. Recurring characters such as Edison, Washington, Baum, and Tesla had nothing to “overcome”—they thought and then did and were great. The influence of hegemonic power—one that can use violence, but often in the US exists with permission through tradition as well as white supremacist imagery—naming practices and glorification of the USA in foreign and domestic wars create a patriarchal Eurocentric dominant discourse that ELLs of color will typically be on the outside of. They will need to draw on the member resources provided by the text and their US peers to gain access to this dominant “patriotic” identity expressed in the United States Grand Narrative to develop a sense of belonging. As the texts tended to tokenize minorities and females, listing their obstacles, weaknesses, and limitations to

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be overcome ahead of or instead of their accomplishments, there is less for ELLs of color—those at the intersection of marginalized ethnic groups and gender identities—to draw on in terms of member resources. This creates underdogs who, like Dolores Huerta, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller, and Deborah Sampson, must overcome their differences, as they are obstacles to success, not characteristics of successful people. Access Access and power create a delicate tightrope in Janks’ model in practice. Access to dominant discourses without a healthy understanding of how these powerful discourses came to be in these preferred positions can normalize and naturalize them, promoting or continuing their dominance. Access without diversity fails to recognize how differences affect paths to access wrapped in a culture’s history, identity, and value. Materials backed by a policy of access that works to maintain students’ home languages and language varieties and values and promotes multilingualism are needed for access to flourish without furthering linguistic hegemony. Access should be tempered with information and opportunities for students to achieve critical consciousness and pursue positive change when racial and linguistic inequities are brought to the table. Janks’ Access line of her model fits well within Anya’s Empowerment category, wherein materials should give access to discourses promoting awareness, responsibility, and agency for equity. There is also overlap with Anya’s Participation, Progress, and Success category in which materials are responsible for providing students of color with information and resources to meet “high expectations,” such as dominant school genres—recounts, instructions, narratives, reports, arguments, and explanations—using explicit pedagogy and access to generic features to give students from marginalized discourses equitable access to them. These texts contain severe flaws in access, empowerment, progress, and success. This series has many traditionally WASP instances and even sexist language. Occupational stereotyping is more common in Benchmark, as described in chapters two and four, where males can be “businessmen” and females are “spinsters.” In Benchmark, no languages other than English are used in these texts, despite featuring characters from different nationalities and cultures on occasion. This lack of linguistic diversity leads to differences in power and access without opportunities to question language status or varieties. Instead, the series legitimatizes only dominant American English, particularly that of upper white middle-class Americans; this can lead ELLs to profile people they meet and either dismiss or overvalue them based on

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how closely they speak to what they are taught through the language and themes in these series (Janks, 2014). OOWTE does marginally better, with occasional words or phrases in multiple languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. The only example this series gave of multilingualism as a tool for success was Sacagawea. Again, the most extended story featuring her focused on an event where she did not know the language being spoken. Opportunities for promoting ASL and Braille were virtually non-existent despite two stories about Helen Keller because the focus was on her differing abilities, not her accomplishments. However, this series presents different writing genres through samples that appear to be written by ELLs from around the world. While these stories are contrived, they do provide access to the narrative, reporting, description, and persuasion genres while featuring stories from ELL children. Access in Janks’ model pertains not only to discourse and language in the academic sense but also to cultural practices and social interactions. These texts provide a plethora of opportunities to engage with patriotic practices in the USA, with little to no awareness of the marginalization of certain ethnic groups or an understanding of the privileges of dominant groups. For example, in Benchmark’s kindergarten text, there is a unit devoted to US celebrations that is an all-male unit. This reflects our national history that sets aside celebrations for men and not for women, furthering male supremacy and the ideology of male exceptionalism. Oddly, this unit contained a story about Thomas Edison, who is not celebrated on any given day in the United States. This shows that the choices for whom to write about were not completely limited to the patriarchal culture of the USA that only officially celebrates male accomplishments. With that knowledge then, it would have served the audience to have added gender diversity to this unit by highlighting the achievement of a female inventor in place of Edison, who had articles written about him in three of the six textbooks in the series already. Or, to better keep with the theme of celebrations, they could have written about Women’s Equality Day, Susan B. Anthony’s birthday, or International Day of the Woman. Beyond gendered depictions of US values through celebrations, there was the perception that there are no marginalized racial or ethnic groups in the USA. Despite the melting pot theory of American culture, there were no examples of multicultural celebrations or holidays celebrated in the US that were not initially nor predominantly white. Again, there was a focus on patriotism, with holidays focused on independence and veterans, which normalized war and white violence. These stories painted a picture of what the dominant culture looks like in the USA. This is access to prevailing cultural practices without an understanding of power. Culturally responsive practices alongside access must affirm the

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minority cultures’ life experiences. While OOWTE provides a unit of personal narratives from immigrant children and multiple units of immigration stories from a historical and present-day context, Benchmark does not capitalize on lived educational or familial experiences in an affirming manner. Access to Participation, Progress, and Success To meet the antiracist protocol’s standards of participation, progress, and success, the text should also include the expectation that minority students and teachers be co-constructors of knowledge. However, both series diminish female and minority accomplishments while promoting white upper-class male accomplishments as normative, creating a link between power and success to masculinity, and physical appearance, cooperativeness, and domesticity to femininity. The hidden curriculum of this linkage between influence and masculinity perpetuates sexist and male supremacist ideologies in the sense that men are portrayed as having contributed more to society that is of value by their sheer presence around topics describing American accomplishments. This hearkens to males as language makers and females as simply users of “man-made language” (Spender, 1985). Women were rarely given the same space for their contributions and were marginalized and underrepresented in multiple fields of study within both series. So, the discourse of exceptionalism is used to marginalize women and their contributions to society. One example from the Benchmark series is a short story from Grade 3, unit 7, discussing the cosmos. This short biography is about Edmund Halley and his contribution to astronomy. However, Carolyn Shoemaker’s impact on astronomy, particularly in the study of comets, is more significant than Halley’s. She has documented more comets than any other astronomer (Chapman, 2002). The exclusion of a female voice and female accomplishment here exceptionalizes male achievement and ignores the more significant contributions of females within the field. If this were an isolated occurrence, it could be more easily overlooked, but just one unit prior, the discussion centered on the Underground Railroad. The biography in this unit was of Levi Coffin, a white male who allowed his house to be used to smuggle enslaved people to freedom. There were more obvious choices that would have included intersectional counternarratives, but oddly, the publishers chose yet another white male voice. To truly focus on ELL success, these texts need to capitalize on minority populations’ contributions, communities, and families. But the overwhelming focus on white male contributions with little to no investigation of the role of power or even the part of family and community places the priority more on giving students access to the cultural practices of the dominant group

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with little to no critical thought about power or engagement with the various populations who have contributed to the communities outside the schools, historically, or present-day. Design Design in the sense Janks’ theory relies on is based on work from the New London Group and their research on multiliteracies. Students should be taught how to produce meaning using all the modalities for representation. Well-designed materials, then, are those that combine and recombine multimodal semiotics to draft possibilities for conscientization and transformation. The emphasis here shifts from reading to multimodal production. Incorporating access, diversity, and power into the design is necessary as, without an understanding of how powerful discourses and practices are repeated in the modes, producers unconsciously replicate them. Multimodal composition without access to dominant discourses runs the risk of remaining on the periphery of the text. And without diversity, dominant forms of multimodality are privileged, and the differences afforded by diversity are ignored or undervalued. Within equity-minded materials analysis protocol, several categories incorporate and push beyond the boundaries of Janks’ theory. Materials that reflect culturally responsive design communicate confidence in the intelligence and ambition of minorities and provide examples of collaborative efforts with students, peers, families, and communities. Culturally responsive texts capitalize on minority populations such as afro-descendants and their contributions and cultural practices to promote learning. The text should bring in multiple understandings of minority students’ prior education and lived experiences to affirm various ways of being. Finally, the teaching engages real-world issues within minority student communities and provides opportunities for critical thinking about racial inequity. With the focus here on opportunities to produce meaning multimodally and providing possibilities for culturally responsive practices, the rest of this section will discuss future redesign efforts. Educators can look for texts that demonstrate non-stereotypical gender roles, gender-neutral texts, and texts that feature minority characters as principal agents in color consciousnessaffirming ways. Developing students’ literacy by exploring their realities should be sought out. However, many educators are limited in either financial means for acquiring well-designed and culturally responsive texts or they are limited in their ability to use texts of their choosing. So, when educators face these limitations, there are several ways they can still promote constructive discussions and awareness of systemic issues impacting minorities and females and

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transformation in the language learning classroom through Janks’ design strand. Through CL, students can analyze a text they are reading, watching, or listening to to find the meaning and the social effects of how power works in their readers. This response will allow for critical consciousness-raising and can be implemented through four steps. First, educators should look for ways to make story comparisons and counternarratives. As evidenced in this series, the accomplishments and contributions of women historically in both texts were diminished in separate ways—several genres, such as folktales, erased female voices and agency. There was little selection of fables that displayed female characters in a positive light. Additionally, few of these genres presented multiliteracies or multicultural information if they were from non-white cultures. However, there are retellings of folktales and fairytales that give perspective to those who did not have it in the original or the textbook versions. In addition, there are more options for children’s biographies that directly engage with women’s contributions throughout history to provide a unique perspective on historical events and women’s influence on our national history. Aesop wrote fables that demonstrate a wider breadth of characters that could be put alongside the repeated tropes in these series without compromising the tell-tale signs of the fable genre. The Anansi stories are prolific in public libraries and multicultural anthologies. By simply looking in the public or school library, going to online streaming services, or using digital resources and websites for educators, teachers can find alternative titles to pair with textbook readings. Students can examine a second reading in groups, only looking for clues about a character or event. Then, they will be able to compare the textbook version to another. They can use multiple modalities to describe characters, locate parts of speech in each to aid in challenging sex stereotypes, and decide whose voices are heard in each version. Then, educators can begin to ask questions about sex stereotypes and raise student awareness of other sides of issues that were concealed, suppressed, fragmented, or legitimated through textbook reading (Burden, 2020). Next, educators can better engage with student voices through critical literacy. Each series contained multicultural stories, but they were more often about the United States or fables, folktales, and fairytales told from a Eurocentric perspective. Students can be asked to describe or research a similar character, event, famous person, or version of a fable, folktale, or fairytale from their home culture and present their stories multilingually and multimodally. This practice will also allow for critical consciousness-raising efforts, as educators can assist students in determining whose voice and perspectives are shared in each version (theirs and the textbook), how males and females

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are depicted in each version and why that may be, and whose thoughts and feelings are valued in each. This response would be an excellent way to use student output as comprehensible input for language learners through an interactive Venn diagram activity during and after student presentations (Burden, 2020). Collaborative redesign allows educators to use critical literacy with these series to promote critical consciousness and language learning. There are ways educators can work with even very young language learners to re-design texts in this series. For example, something as simple as changing the pronouns and nouns in a story, such as the “Princess and the Pea,” in Benchmark Grade 2 unit 2 would allow for a mini-lesson on pronouns followed by a more extensive opportunity to critically discuss gender roles. Children could work together first to make every reference to the prince say “princess” and every reference to the princess say “prince.” Then, they could do the same for male and female pronouns. Children could re-draw pictures that put the princess in the adventures featured in the drawings from the textbook. This activity would allow students to criticize what might have been taken for granted about men’s and women’s roles in finding suitable mates. Students could also write or perform alternate endings to the stories in either series. Students might focus on ending the story the way they have heard stories in their home culture, choosing to reflect on the decision-making processes of their own families. Or, they could make an ending that gives a secondary character in the textbook a more prominent voice. They could be encouraged to use non-dominant dialects, translanguaging, or other languages to reflect their realities in alternate endings. Each of these ideas should use family and community involvement. Asking parents to tell fairy tales and fables they learned as children either in an interview format at home or by asking parents to come and speak to the classroom would rely heavily on student funds of knowledge for re-design. Finally, students could create objects that rename a character that was suppressed, “thingified,” or villainized in the textbooks. Pippa Stein experimented with crafting for critical literacy in the South African context and found that students in her classes from minority groups brought in more found objects, cultural artifacts, and family treasures to express their understanding of a text or theme (Stein, 2004). By allowing students to use their member resources to re-name or re-characterize a person or non-human from the textbook, they are effectively redesigning the text using their realities (Janks, 2004).

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Classroom, School, and Societal Evaluations The explanation stage aims to determine how discourse is part of a social process and practice determined by social structures and what effects these discourses can have on these structures (Fairclough, 2015). For my study, the social processes revolved around power relations regarding gender and its intersection with ethnicity. I drew on critical literacy to reconstruct the texts and frame my explanation of these social processes at the situational, institutional, and social levels. Benchmark The ideologies embedded within these texts targeted at young English Language Learners are more likely to be internalized and acted upon due to their subtle nature within the classroom learning at a situational level. Overt sexism might receive notice and questioning, but normalizing subtle forms of biases may not receive the same level of inquiry. These texts need to be re-designed to promote critical language awareness on an institutional level. White discourses and themes legitimize the values of those in power in the United States. One could look at the makeup of the current US Senate and see a similar visual representation to what is represented within these series. These themes supported white male exceptionalism to the exclusion of female accomplishments and ethnic marginalization that promotes the idea that color is something to be overcome as a society. On a situational level, most instructions following readings ask students to demonstrate an understanding of key terms or language arts themes such as plot, predictions, and summaries; thus, very little explicit pedagogy takes place for granting access to all learners to these genres. There is a glaring lack of critical thinking questions. In the classroom, young learners from diverse backgrounds may find more stories that support a patriarchal view of family and gender roles, placing females at a disadvantage in language learning as there is more space given to language describing and being used by males, which male students will be more apt to imitate. As there are more active verbs and more detailed descriptions of male characters, at a classroom level, male students may be able to pick up these descriptions and play with these discursive actions through role-play and other communicative or cooperative learning activities, which would advantage them further in language learning by engaging kinesthetic intelligence in a way that language surrounding female actions does not. The themes of male supremacy and female value linked to materialism, cooperativeness, and domesticity may be familiar to some learners from cultures with similar expressed values. This text does nothing to challenge these

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ideologies allowing for critical thinking about gender and language learning. In the classroom, the themes of male competitiveness and female cooperation mirror what is seen in mainstream US classrooms, which place female language learners at a disadvantage in terms of opportunities for interaction with the teacher and holding the floor in the second language, as these are constituted as rewards for competitive actions. These discourses legitimize the double standard in treating males and females regarding competitive play—namely, it is encouraged and normalized in males and is discouraged and othered in females in favor of cooperative play (Tannen,1990). This also places greater weight and stress on male learners and assumes all males will fit into the aggressive masculinity portrayed in this series which may serve to “other” males who do not fit into this narrow category and mirrors evidence in elementary school reading textbooks in the USA where males were shown to be aggressive, argumentative, and competitive (Evans and Davies, 2000). These texts reproduce what the California Board of Education (BOE) as an institution values in female and male interaction and behavior in the classroom—a separate, unequal, double standard. The unequal power relations place white males as dominant and all females as secondary, displaying the values of the textbooks’ publishers and, in a broader sense, the California BOE, what is considered an institutional level. Fairclough asks critical linguists to recognize that settings are both penetrated by processes and relations at an international level and potentially contribute to shaping those processes and relations going forward (Fairclough, 2015). This belies the potential that through shaping the realities of language about the larger world, a textbook curriculum can shape relations at an international level. On that international level, stories that depict minority cultures but lack enough sourcing on origins, values, challenges, and accomplishments create a stereotypical understanding of non-white cultures that may assume patriarchy as the norm, among other harmful tropes and stereotypes of South American, Asian, and Indigenous cultures. Leaving out an understanding of an entire continent’s knowledge, cultures, and customs—i.e., Africa—supports an exclusionist and ethnocentric ideology of white supremacy. On Our Way to English On a classroom level, historical fiction and non-fiction within this series help new language learners to identify with the stories and characters and to feel comfortable in their Texas classroom, lowering their affective filter. This series has examples of females overcoming artificial language and cultural barriers. This is also true for males, as there are multiple biographies and short stories about young male immigrants to the United States. However, like Benchmark, cooperation for females and competition for males still

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places both at a disadvantage through gender essentialism. This puts extra pressure on both to conform, with males outperforming one another in “one-upmanship” and for females to make themselves diminutive through cooperation that may not give them the same chances to speak or be listened to when they speak or to interact with the teacher (Tannen, 1990). On an institutional level, Texas boards of education desire this type of coverage of immigrants within their state to incentivize behaviors that are considered patriotic—gaining employment, seeking citizenship, earning an education, and appreciating the state’s history. If all immigrants to the state do these things, it is good for their economy, production, and innovation. It also encourages young people to assimilate, learn English, and become productive (i.e., non-welfare receiving) members of Texas society. This monolingual desire (English only), enterprising spirit, and patriotism are US values that this series pushes through these texts. Considering these texts on an international level, these pro-immigrant, pro-minority, and pro-female messages position language learners to see the United States through a different lens than perhaps news media and the current political climate in the USA paint themselves. Among other first-world nations, the US is not seen currently as pro-immigration or pro-minority. These students are receiving messages contradicting what politicians on the political right say about them. However, while this series does present immigrants and migrants in a positive light, which helps language learners feel less anxious in the classroom, it stands in stark contrast with the lived experiences of an increasing number of black and brown families in the United States due to a rise in “Law and Order” political ideology on the right (Macias Rojas, 2018). This series presents a pro-immigrant idealized reality that does not attempt to provide space for counternarratives or other forms of resistance in the language learning classroom. There is little attempt to give the language skills students need to advocate for themselves or their families against policies and ideologies that harm them. Furthermore, the stories about indigenous peoples paint them as otherworldly and un-American. Tropes and homogeneity about Native Americans proliferate this series, promoting discrimination and stereotyping at the community level. Three federally recognized tribes have reservations in Texas—the Alabama-Coushatta, Tigua, and Kickapoo. Texas recognized Lipan Apache Tribe, which has a headquarters in McAllen, TX (The Bullock Museum, 2022). By treating Native Americans as un-American by separating their folklore from American folklore, applying tropes of Native Americanness in naming and in images, and assuming homogeneity in naming and choosing not to attribute stories to their Nations or their geographical regions in the Americas, the series disrespects the Nations residing in Texas and subtly confirms these ideologies for students as well.

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Finally, through the multiple discourses that position females and males into different identities, there are implications at each level of Fairclough’s Framework. On a classroom level, males are encouraged to be assertive, even aggressive with language, competitive, and take the floor. Females are encouraged to be cooperative and play well with others, to defer to more assertive personalities, and to play by the rules. If they do this, the text insinuates that on a societal level, they will be successful in education, work, and attaining status within male-dominated fields such as a doctor, hotel owner, and tour guides. CONCLUSION Using specific discourse analysis tools targeted toward research questions about gender and ethnic representations of humans, non-humans, and genres, the analyst and the educator can deconstruct any text to uncover the convergence of power, access, and diversity or lack thereof to prepare a text for re-design. While Fairclough’s framework has been the foundation for the analyses laid out in this book, the freedom created within the overlapping three stages allows for exploration from various angles. In this book, I have examined texts using corpus linguistics, d/Discourse analysis tools, an Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, literary, sociological, and anthropological theories, feminist theory, and protocol for material analysis for antiracist, equity-minded, inclusive practices. The results are a thorough analysis with consideration for multiple perspectives in addition to information about the state of English Language Learners’ literacy materials in the USA currently. My hope for the educator is that you now have a robust analytic toolbox at your disposal to interrogate your texts before reading what your students read, and beyond. My hope for the researcher is that you can use these same tools to bring critical awareness to gender and ethnic representations in texts relevant to your discipline and that you use your toolbox to promote conscious change in your context. The series analyzed in this book have not enjoyed an improvement in gender representation over time, nor do they reflect antiracist ideals. They are on par with Porreca’s 1984 study in multiple ways. They have much room to grow to be truly equity-minded and inclusive, as they reflect the same issues reported in Evans and Davies’s look at elementary-grade history books in 2000 regarding views of civil rights as completed, liberal myths of color-blindness and meritocracy, among other issues uncovered in this book. More applied linguists are turning to social justice reforms through classroom research and various forms of linguistic analysis, paying greater

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attention to how we position ourselves and our students as well as how we share knowledge and power. This work sets the foundation to build on by providing theories, explanations, methods, and examples, which I have collectively described as “tools” to facilitate understanding and exploration to address and resolve problems of equity not only in learning materials but also in other areas of inquiry that can create a more just world.

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Appendix

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS FOR CLASSROOM USE  EXAMPLE LESSON

Preparation A.  Materials: Tale of Peter Rabbit or another Beatrix Potter story on Project Gutenberg. West African Folk tales about Cunnie Rabbit from Project Gutenberg. Blank rabbit and dik dik coloring pictures. Crayons, scissors, glue, Popsicle sticks. B.  Objectives: Practice making inferences and retelling stories. Compare and Contrast Main Characters. C.  Language: pronoun use/placement, gendered nouns; clothing words D.  Level: upper elementary. Intermediate learners. E.  Duration: 2–3 days of 1-hour classes. Presentation A.  Before Reading: Ask students to describe the everyday clothing and traditional clothing worn in their home cultures. Teacher Tip: put students into small groups of differing home cultures if possible. B.  Share the special names of their traditional or everyday clothing that might not be found in a local big American box store. What clothing words are unique to each student? (Write these on the board, allowing students to define these how they choose. Do not speak for students here.) C.  Front-load Vocabulary: Ask students to help label any drawing of a child from the unique teaching context, labeling their articles of clothing. D.  Reading Walk: Pass out copies of Cunnie Rabbit stories and Peter Rabbit stories. Ask students to get into groups based on like stories. 129

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Walk through, looking at the pictures. What clothing do the characters wear? Does anything surprise them about the drawings? Read the story titles. What do they think the story will be about? E.  Read: Read one Cunnie Rabbit story aloud since it is written in a non-standard dialect of English that may be difficult for students to read alone. F.  After Reading: Ask comprehension questions as they read about what the text says about the names of the clothing items the characters are wearing. Write those clothing words on the board. G.  Ask students to find the words that tell whether the animal is male or female and mark them. Share out those words. Where are those words in the story? Pull out sentences containing gendered nouns and pronouns and write them on the board, asking students to notice syntax. a.  This would be an appropriate time to ask questions about why certain clothing choices were made by the authors/illustrators for male and female animals. H.  Divide the clothing words on the board as worn by males or females. Ask which words describe clothing worn in the students’ home cultures or in their current context. Mark those. I.  Do the same for any Peter Rabbit tale. There should be significantly more clothing words and gendered nouns. Ask students targeted questions to help them see the European fixation on clothing, especially gender-based clothing. a.  Share the origins of each story printed on the front of the books on Project Gutenberg. Ask students which animal story they preferred and why. This would make a good think-pair-share. b.  Ask students to name some similarities and differences between Cunnie Rabbit and Peter Rabbit (or any of the other Rabbits in Potter’s series) J.  Pass out the blank rabbit and dik dik coloring pictures. On their own or with a friend from their home culture, draw new clothes for these characters. They can be from their home culture, clothing words learned that day, or a mixture. K.  Cut out animals and glue them to Popsicle sticks. Practice retelling a favorite part of the Cunnie Rabbit or Peter Rabbit tales within groups. L.  Try making up a story with the rabbit puppets! Use home language, English, or a mixture to make the story unique.

Index

Page references for figures and tables are italicized. A Aesop/Aesop’s Fables: competition in “Tortoise and the Hare,” 58; example of female character less intelligent than male, 48; and fable genre, 112; non-human stories originating from, 51; in textbook series, 51; use of fables that favor male characters, 71 agency: of Black people, 5, 85; female, 25, 26, 34, 39, 81; hidden through language, 38; and linguistic suppression, 5, 38; and named characters, 24; and patriarchal respect, 23 American Evangelical church, 50 American folklore. See tall tales Anansi stories, the, 59, 112 “Ancient Egypt,” 72–73 Anya’s Language Program Materials Analysis for Antiracist, EquityMinded, and Inclusive Practices:

considering whether materials empower the reader to address or reduce inequity, 104; and Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP), 97–98; on diversity and inclusivity, 104; on empowerment, 102; and Janks’ toolkits, 108; used to determine the extent of antiracist, inclusive, and equity-minded materials used in programs, 98 Asian/Pacific Island people, 6–7, 54–55, 102 Aztec people, 89 B Bailey, Moya, 86 “Bake Sale,” 42 Baptiste, Tracy, 59–60 The Bedford Book of Genres: A Guide and Reader, 66 Beetle (character), 47–48, 49 Benchmark series: about, 7–8; adjective study for each sex by genre, 75–76; 131

132

Index

animals and other non-human characters, 46–47; Benchmark Gendered Pronouns by Genre, 70; Benchmark Top 10 Gendered Nouns by Genre, 67; and characters of color, 35; dependence upon White European animal stories, folktales, fairy tales, and fables in textbooks, 51; on discrimination, racism, and marginalization, 104; examples of males go out/females stay home, 50; Female Adjectives in Benchmark, 28; and gendered hyponymy, 71–72; lack of critical thinking questions in, 114; Male Adjectives in Benchmark, 29; and range of verbs associated with males, 74; sexist language in, 108; slavery in, 102, 103; themes of marginalization in, 114; White Anglo- Saxon Protestant characters, 70; women of color in, 38–39 Bhattacharya’s study, 49 BIPOC, 40 Black people: in African, Caribbean, and Black South American folklore, 59–60; Black feminist movement, 24; and depictions of power and agency, 5; erasure of Black culture, 58–60; John Henry (character), 41, 43, 76, 77; John Henryism, 43–44; marginalization of in Spanish textbooks, 59;

Marie M. Daly, 39, 85–87, 86, 104; Martin Luther King, Jr., 5–6, 40, 85, 87–88; and misogynoir, 86; Rosa Parks, 84–85, 87–88; statistics on immigrant groups in US of various origins, 59; striving to get ahead in an unequal society, 43–44; Zora Neale Hurston, 39, 70, 86, 104 Blue Bird Woman (character), 52–53 C California: California Benchmark Advance: Texts for English Language Development, California, 7; California Board of Education (BOE), 3–4, 115; investigation of discursive representations of gender and ethnicity in two series of English Language Development (ELD) textbooks in Texas and California, 7–8. See also Benchmark series Canagarajah, Suresh, 60 Carlota (character), 92 CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis). See Fairclough’s Critical Dialectal Approach to CDA “The Changing Tea Kettle: A Japanese Folktale,” 54, 61 Chavez, Cesar, 40, 43, 93 Chief Deer Man (character), 52–53 Chi Li (character), 54, 55–56 “Chi Li and the Serpent,” 54 “Chi Li Slays the Giant Serpent,” 54 Christian authors, 51 Christian fundamentalist families, 51, 106 “Cinderella’s Very Bad Day,” 40–41

Index

“Cinderella: Too Much for Words,” 40–41 Circle Round podcast, 60 “A Citizen of the United States,” 16 “City Mouse Country Mouse,” 47 civil rights/Civil Rights movement, 5, 102, 107 Civil War America, 5, 6, 89, 104 Clara Diaz (character), 26 classroom, school, and societal evaluations: interweaving of Janks’ and Anya’s works, 98–114; lack of critical thinking questions, 114 “Clever Raven,” 48 Clyde the City Mouse (character), 47 code meshing, 25 complementarian families, 51 concealing, 54 Confederacy/Confederate soldiers, 5 conservatives/conservative politicians, 105, 106 control, 12, 23, 54 Cora (character), 58 corpus linguistics, 18–20 corpus tools, 18 counter-storytelling, 24 “Crafty Fox,” 48 “Crane and Wolf,” 71 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 24 critical literacy, engaging: access and power in Janks’ model, 108–10; access to participation, progress, and success, 110–11; aggressive male, 100–101; Anya’s Framework on empowerment, 102; assumptions about culture, intelligence, class, and language questioned, 103; cooperative outspoken female, 101;

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critical literacy as critical pedagogy, 96–97; critical race pedagogy, 97–98; design in Janks’ theory, 111–13; discrimination, racism, and marginalization, 102–3; diversity, 104–6; domestic father, 99; and Fairclough’s Framework for CDA explanation stage, 95–96, 97, 114; minorities as legitimate speakers, teachers, and learners, 107; power and the cooperative female, 101–2; power relations, 98–99; stereotypes about minoritized women rejected, 103–4; strong female protagonist, 99 CRP (Critical Race Pedagogy), 17–18, 97–98 CRT (Critical Race Theory): analysis of, 16–18; and counter-storytelling, 24; defined, 16; liberal myth of colorblindness, 36; liberal myth of meritocracy, 43; tenets, 16 curriculum of inferiority, 3 D Daly, Marie M., 39, 85–87, 86, 104 de Beauvoir, Simone, 91 “The Declaration of Independence,” 23 DeMoss, Nancy Lee, 51 de Soto, Hernando, 88–89 discrimination: Benchmark series on, 104; and CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis), 12; discrimination, racism, and marginalization, 102–3; in Eurocentric societies, 24; gender and Title IX, 3; linguistic, 6, 18;

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Index

rationalization for underemployment and underpayment of women, 51; tropes and homogeneity about Native Americans, 116. See also ethnicity/ethnic representations; gender/gender representation; racism; sexism/ sexist/sex bias domination, 12–13, 97, 98 Douglass, Frederick, 93 E Edison, Thomas, 83–87, 86 EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks, 2, 23–24, 33–34, 49 ELD (English Language Development), 7, 8 The Elements of Style (Strunk and White), 6 empowerment, 98, 102, 108 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. See EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks. See ESL textbooks English Language Development (ELD). See ELD (English Language Development) epistemological racism, 51–52 ESL textbooks: findings in studies of, 4; little research about gender and ethnic representations in, 7; no studies on non-humans in US context, 48–49; no studies since 1984 on, 23, 33; role of published curricula in ESL classrooms, 2; US context lags behind Turkish, Japanese, and Hong Kong EFL contexts, 33 Esperanza Rising, 41 ethnicity/ethnic representations: erasure of Black culture, 58–60;

ethnicity defined, 12; in fiction and non-fiction genres, 6; in history textbooks in Southern United States, 5; immigrants as undependable and lazy, 37–38; and influential neoconservatives, 5; investigation of discursive representations of gender and ethnicity in two series of English Language Development (ELD) textbooks in Texas and California, 7–8; linguistic suppression of female protagonists in ethnic folklore, 52–55; and The Lost Cause movement, 5; multilingualism, 60–63; overreliance on White knowledge, 51–52; when race of character correlates positively with race of reader, 6 ethnocentrism/ethnocentric, 17, 53, 89 Eurocentric/Eurocentrism, 59, 72, 89 evaluations, classroom, school, and societal: and Benchmark series, 114–15; and disrespecting Native American Nations residing in Texas, 116; greater weight and stress placed on male learners, 115; incentivizing patriotic behaviors in immigrants, 116; and OOWTE (On Our Way to English) national series, 115–17; settings both penetrated by and contributing to processes and relations, 115;

Index

themes of male competitiveness and female cooperation mirror classrooms, 115 F fables, 51, 61. See also Aesop/Aesop’s Fables Fairclough, Norman, 12, 13 Fairclough’s Critical Dialectal Approach to CDA: approach to second phase of, 76; description and interpretation intertwined, 13–15; description phase, 13, 18; explanation phase, 95–96, 97, 114; interpretation phase, 12; main assumptions of, 12–13; purpose of, 13; three interrelated stages of, 13–15 Fairclough’s Dialectal Relational Approach, 13 fairy tales: Americanized, 80; critical genre analysis through, 79, 83; Disney versions of, 96; minority culture, 82; textbook series rely heavily upon European, 51, 61 families: assumed roles of mothers and fathers, 35; Christian fundamentalist, 51; complementarian, 51; female roles in traditional family values, 56; stereotypes about roles, 35; traditional family values for cultures other than dominant white Americans, 36; traditional roles of mothers, 34; traditional values, 34; traditional views of, 32 female cooperation, 58, 101, 115–16

135

female visibility, 4 feminist theory, 91–92 figured worlds theory, 80–81 “Fire of the Jaguar,” 59 First Nations peoples, 43. See also Indigenous peoples; Native American/ Native Americans firstness, 4 folktales/folklore: and Circle Round podcast, 60; defined, 77–78; gendered hyponyms prolific in, 62; mythical human-like characters and humans within, 59; textbook series rely heavily upon European, 51, 61; trickster folktales, 59. See also Native American/Native Americans; tall tales Fowler and Kress study, 1979, 12–13 Fox (character), 48, 69 “Fox and Crow,” 48 “Frog and the Ox,” 71 G Garcia, Ofelia, 60 Gee, John Paul, 1 Gee’s: D/discourse Analysis Framework, 15–16, 56; Significance Building Tool, 34, 56; Subject Tool, 16, 56; Toolkit for Critical Discourse Analysis, 76; Tools for Genre Analysis, 9; Why This Way and Not That Way Tool, 52, 56, 76–77 gendered hyponymy, 71–72 gender/gender representation: female roles in traditional family values, 56;

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Index

females are cooperative/males are competitive, 41–42, 43, 58; findings in studies of ESL textbooks focusing on, 4; gender defined, 11–12; gender essentialism, 50; investigation of discursive representations of gender and ethnicity in two series of English Language Development (ELD) textbooks in Texas and California, 7–8; male-centered, male-only stories, 41; male exceptionalism, 57; men go out/women stay home, 40–41, 57–58; and pioneering study of Karen Porecca, 4; rationalizations for underemployment and underpayment of women, 51; second generation studies of, 4; women’s accomplishments minimized/ men’s accomplishments maximized, 36–37. See also Hartman and Judd genre, role of: Benchmark Gendered Pronouns by Genre, 70; Benchmark Top 10 Gendered Nouns by Genre, 67; categories shared by both series, 66; experiential value through classification schemes, 74–75; experiential value through gendered hyponymy, 71–72; exploring intersectionality through multiple lenses, 78–79; feminist theory, 91–92; figured worlds theory, 80–81; Gender-Marked Words by Genre, 73;

genre defined, 65; intersections with race and ethnicity, 92–94; intertextuality, 82–83; likeability trap and misogynoir, 86; Linguistic Comparison of Edison and Daly, 86; male-focused biographies, 83–84; the male gaze, 90–91; master scripting, 84–85; minimizing female perspectives in biographies, 83–84; noun study, 66–69; OOWTE 10 Top Gendered Nouns by Genre, 68; OOWTE favors male characters in type, 68; OOWTE Gendered Pronouns by Genre, 71; patriarchal buttressing, 89–90; pronoun description, 70–71; situated-meaning theory, 79–80; studying adjective collocations, 76; type versus token, 69–70; verb study, 74; weak women, 93; white injury narratives, 88–89 Gershuny, H. Lee, 2 The Giant’s Wife (character), 22 Giroux, Henry, 2 Gnat (character), 47 grand narrative, 37, 78–79, 107 H Halley, Edmund, 110 Halliwell, James Richard, 34 Hartman and Judd, 4, 23 Heath, Shirley Brice, 104 Hen (character), 69 hen characters, 47 hero, 77–78 hidden curriculum, 2, 81, 110 High Horse (character), 52

Index

Hirschfelder and Molin, 53 “History of Betsy Ross,” 37 “How Beetle Got Her Coat,” 47, 58 “How Water Came to Dry Lands”: authors’ use of passive voice in, 16; creates false multicultural perspective, 79; failure to represent multilingualism, 61; female accomplishments surprise male characters in, 47; female backgrounding in, 52–53; linguistic suppression in, 52, 57 Huerta, Dolores, 43, 70 human character analysis, description: address titles, 32–33, 32; adjective collocations in genderreferring expressions, 27–31; counternarratives, 25–26; features of examined texts, 21; Female Adjectives in Benchmark, 28; Female Adjectives in OOWTE, 30; Gender-Marked Words, 26–27, 27; intersectionality, 24–25; Male Adjectives in Benchmark, 29; Male Adjectives in OOWTE, 31; male and female appearances, 22; pronoun study, 26, 26; Top Ten Gendered Nouns by Series, 22; verbs associated with males and females, 32; worldwide comparisons, 23–24, 33–34 human character analysis, interpretation: European naming conventions, 35–36; females are cooperative/males are competitive, 41–42; John Henryism, 43–44;

137

men go out and have adventures/ women stay home and wait, 40–41; noun analysis interpretations, 34–35; traditional family values for cultures other than dominant white americans, 36; of verb analysis, 36–37; women’s accomplishments minimized/ men’s accomplishments maximized, 36–37 humans and non-humans, comparison of: in corpus, 55–56; erasure of Black culture, 58–60; female role in traditional family values, 56; females are cooperative/males are competitive, 58; male exceptionalism, 57; men go out/women stay home, 57–58; multilingualism, 60–63 human trafficking, 39 Hurston, Zora Neale, 39, 70, 86, 104 I immigrants: in “A Citizen of the United States,” 17–18; coverage of immigrants in Texas, 105; female cooperation stories can teach respect for, 101; historical marginalization of, 102; mass deportation of, 105; OOWTE series presents counternarratives about immigrants’ motives and lived experiences, 102–3; statistics by Pew Research Center on, 59; as undependable and lazy, 37–38;

138

Index

as villains, 88–89 Indigenous peoples, 39, 43, 51, 53 Industrial Revolution, 37, 42, 50, 51 International Monetary Fund, 57 intertextuality, 82–83 Invisible One (character), 82 “Ivan Finds His Place,” 42 J “Jack and the Beanstalk,” 22, 24, 56 Jack’s Mother (character), 22 James, Sherman, 43 Janks, Hillary, 80 Janks’ Interdependent Theory of Critical Literacy: access and power in Janks’ model, 108–9; and design, 111–13; distinction between positive and negative power, 101; diversity includes linguistics, 104; four elements to, 97–98 Jim Crow laws, 85 John Henry (character), 41, 43, 76, 77 John Henryism, 43–44 Johnson, Lyndon, 87–88 Jumbies (characters), 59–60 K Kate the Country Mouse (character), 47, 50 Keller, Helen, 93, 96, 105 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 5–6, 40, 85, 87–88 King of Beasts (character), 47 Kipling, Rudyard, 37 Kiran Shah (character), 103 Ku Klux Klan, 102 L Language and Power (Fairclough), 13 Latinx, 5, 25, 107 Lee, Jackie, 18–19 “Let the Water Flow,” 43, 79 Levi Coffin (character), 102

Lexico, 17 Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free (DeMoss), 51 “The Likeability Trap,” 86 linguistic backgrounding, 38 linguistic suppression, 38, 54 “Lion and Mouse,” 71 The Little Red Hen, 56 “The Lost Cause” movement, 5 “The Loveliest Song of All: A Mayan Folktale,” 54, 61 Lowell Mills Girls, 36–38 Lucy, Demskey, Bromley, and Jurafsky, 5 M majority cultures, 6, 12, 84 male competition, 42, 58, 115–16 male gaze, 90–91 manifest destiny, 78 mansplaining, 49–50 marginalization: Benchmark series on, 104; of Black people in Spanish textbooks, 59; discrimination, racism, and marginalization, 102–3; of ethnic groups and privileges of dominant groups, 109; with suppression and backgrounding of minority females, 54; themes in Benchmark series, 114 marking, 26 Martin, Joseph Plumb, 104 Martin, Rafe, 82 Martin and Nakayama, 12, 37, 78 master scripting, 84–85 “Mean Dean,” 100 Melamut the Crocodile (character), 61, 69 Menendez, Alicia, 86 meritocracy, 40, 43 Miguel (character), 25, 103 Millie (goat character), 50

Index

“A Mill Picture,” 36 minorities: insinuations that all ethnic minorities are same, 82; as legitimate speakers, teachers, and learners, 107–8; mass incarceration of, 105; and raciolinguistic ideologies as manifested in curricula, 18; in US and World History textbooks, 5; and worldview of dominant culture, 2 misogynoir, 86 “The Missing Goddess,” 59 Mosquito (character), 47 Mother Fox (character), 50 Mother Jones, 38 “Mrs. Stowe and the President,” 32–33 multilingual/multilingualism, 2, 6, 61 multiliteracy, 62 “My Family Works the Land,” 25–26, 41 “My Two Homes,” 26, 41 N The National Farm Workers Association, 43 National Organization of Women (NOW). See NOW (National Organization of Women) Native American/Native Americans: alteration of “Rough-Faced Girl” folktale, 82; characters in stories, 52–53; folklore not presented as American, 78–79, 116; inconsistency in naming Native American tribes contributing folklore, 79; significant role in tales of, 52; tropes and homogeneity about, 116 New London Group, 111 news media, right-wing, 106 “The Nez Perce Help Us!” 39

139

non-human character analysis, description: adjective study, 47–48; type versus token, 46–47; worldwide comparisons, 48–49 non-human character analysis, interpretation: linguistic suppression of female protagonists in ethnic folklore, 52–55; male exceptionalism, 49–50; males go out/females stay home, 50–51; overreliance on White knowledge, 51–52 non-standard writing, 6 NOW (National Organization of Women), 3 The Nursery Rhymes of England (James Richard Halliwell), 34 O “The Oak and The Reeds,” 71 Oakley, Annie, 77 OOWTE (On Our Way to English) national series: about, 7–8; and cultural diversity in gendered proper nouns, 70; dependence upon White European animal stories, folktales, fairy tales, and fables in textbooks, 51; disrespecting Native American Nations residing in Texas, 116; favors male characters in type, 68; Female Adjectives in OOWTE, 30; human and non-human characters, 46–47; Male Adjectives in OOWTE, 31; minority voices, 70; OOWTE 10 Top Gendered Nouns by Genre, 68;

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Index

OOWTE Gendered Pronouns by Genre, 71; physical description adjectives for females, 76; presents counternarratives about immigrants’ motives and lived experiences, 102–3; traditional families and traditional gender roles in, 34; women of color in, 38–39 OOWTE: Texas series (On Our Way to English: Texas series), 7–8, 62–63, 106 oppress/oppression, 12, 103 “Our Rainforest Home,” 41 “Owl and the Grasshopper,” 71 P Parks, Rosa, 84–85, 87–88 patriarchal buttressing, 89–91 Paul Bunyan (character), 41, 76, 77 Pavlenko, Aneto, 2 Pecos Bill (character), 41, 77 people of color, 51, 85, 88–89 “People We Celebrate,” 40 personification, 38 Pew Research Center, 59 Pizarro, Francisco, 88 “The Plain Tree,” 71 Porreca, Karen, 4, 23–24 Post-Industrial Revolution America, 50 Post-Industrial Revolution Patriarchy, 42 “A Pot of Gold,” 58 Pre-Columbian societies, 89 “Princess and the Pea,” 113 Q Quang (character), 25, 103 R race neutrality, 16, 18 raciolinguistic ideology, 62 racism: appears normal when ingrained in society, 55;

Benchmark series on, 104; and Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP), 97; deeply and invisibly enmeshed in institutions, 16; discrimination, racism, and marginalization, 102–3; in educational materials, 18; epistemological racism, 51–52, 59; harmful stereotypes in endemic racism, 25; as historical issue solved by white men, 85. See also CRT (Critical Race Theory) Reagan administration, 105 The Red Badge of Courage, 104 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 5 Ross, Betsy, 33, 37 “Rough-Faced Girl,” 82 “Russian Cinderella,” 54 S Sacagawea, 38–39, 93, 103, 104 SAE (Standard American English), 6 Sally-Ann Thunder-Ann Whirlwind Crockett (character), 77 Sampson, Deborah, 105–6 second wave feminist movement, 3–4 sexism/sexist/sex bias: assumptions about female characters, 81; found in studies of ESL textbooks, 4; funding to eliminate, 3; sex defined, 11–12; sexist language in Benchmark series textbooks, 108; stereotyping, 18, 33, 50. See also discrimination Shardakova, Marya, 2 Shoemaker, Carolyn, 110 Shoemaker, the (character), 56 “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” 56

Index

Sims and Stephens, 77–78 situated-meaning theory, 79–80 slavery, 5, 39, 102, 103 Slue Foot Sue (character), 77 The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen, 56 Snail (African character), 48, 49 “Snail Girl Brings Water,” 54 Snail/Snail Girl (Native American character), 52–53, 54 social segregation, 5 Standard American English (SAE). See SAE (Standard American English) Stein, Pippa, 113 stereotype threat, 38 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 32 subjugate/subjugation, 12, 91, 97 Swartz, Ellen, 84 T Talbot, Mary, 11–12, 29, 49, 50 tall tales, 43, 77–79 Tannen, Deborah, 42 Tesla, Nikola, 24, 107 Texas: coverage of immigrants, 116; disrespect of Native American Nations in, 116; investigation of discursive representations of gender and ethnicity in two series of English Language Development (ELD) textbooks in Texas and California, 7–8; Texas Board of Education (TBOE), 3–4, 116. See also OOWTE: Texas series (On Our Way to English: Texas series) textbooks/educational materials: to early constructivists, 2; effects of using Standard American English in, 6; ethnicity in, 5–7; importance of human agents in, 2;

141

influence of powerful neoconservatives in, 5, 6; Martin Luther King, Jr. in history, 5–6; rising costs and need for greater critical analysis of, 3; role of Texas and California in publication of, 3–4; US History, 4, 5; value of gender/ethnic representations in language learning, 6; World History, 4, 5 Thompson, Marshall Putnam, 36–38 Title IX, 3 Toad (character), 58 Tortoise (character), 47–48, 49 “Tortoise and the Hare,” 47, 58 translanguaging, 60 Trump, Donald, 89 Tubman, Harriet, 39 U Underground Railroad, 102 United States: Bureau of Labor, 57; Census, 2019, 57; Census, 2020, 2 Usborne, 59 V Vanessa (character), 25–26 voting, 87, 102 Vygotsky, Lev, 2 W White people/Whiteness: dependence upon White European animal stories, folktales, fairy tales, and fables in textbooks, 51; overreliance on White knowledge, 51–52; White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP), 35, 106–7;

142

white injury narratives, 88–89; whiteness defined, 16; white parents who adopt Chinese children in fictional depictions, 6–7; white privilege, 53; white supremacy, 5–6, 16, 39, 40, 105 “Why Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears,” 58 “Why Turtle’s Shell is Cracked,” 58 “Wise Friend Fox,” 48 women/females: of color, 39; rationalization for underemployment and underpayment of women, 51;

Index

social conditioning of, 42; tied to domestic activities, 5; traditional roles of mothers, 34; use of diminutive size and intellect in, 49; vague language tied to women, 34; who appear helpless, 50; worth based on physical features, 50 Women’s Educational Equity Act, 3 Wong Ming-Chung (character), 39 Y “Yeh-Shen,” 79 Yeh-Shen (character), 80–81, 96

About the Author

Amy Burden has taught ESL, World Languages, Composition, Linguistics, and TESL Teacher Training for 15 years in the USA and The Philippines. Her dissertation focused on critical discourse analysis for gender representation in children’s ESL readers. After completing her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from The University of Memphis in 2020, she held an English Language Fellowship through the US Department of State in the Philippines, served as an assistant professor of Applied Linguistics and TESL at The University of Memphis and then as an ESL Assessment Specialist for the University of Michigan in the Language Assessment program. She currently works as the Multilingual Multimodal Test Development Manager at the Center for Applied Linguistics, where she is focused on a project that integrates multilingualism into formative assessments in the elementary science classroom.

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