The present study revisits the issue of gender positioning within the visual discourse of three Algerian secondary education English textbooks. In order to get an informed view about gender representation in these materials, it was deemed necessary to combine the outcomes of theoretical critical accounts with language teachers´ potential interpretations of gender bias within the textbooks. First, the selected visual corpus was scrutinized for gender bias through critical image analysis. The major aspects, in which gender bias can be embedded, have been addressed within a well-elaborated framework. Second, the perceptions that secondary education EFL teachers have of this issue were surveyed by dint of a self-report questionnaire which was submitted to a conveniently selected sample. The comparative analysis of the results indicate that while the majority of the images display clear signs of bias against females, most teachers hardly view any imbalances between the two genders as far as visual representation is concerned. This mismatch seems arguably related to the fact that gender bias is still considered a peripheral area of interest by the majority of EFL language practitioners.
Promoting students' knowledge of the reading process as well as their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies has become a crucial issue of ESP teaching and undoubtedly an obligatory subject in higher education. Relevant to this, the present paper tries to examine Algerian ESP students' awareness and use of reading strategies, especially while reading academic material in English. The study is realized through the administration of Mokhtari and Sheorey's (2002) Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) to 100 students enrolled in first year engineering classes at the National Higher School for Hydraulics (ENSH), mainly to find out: (1) frequency of students' reported use of different reading strategies (Global, Problem-solving and Support reading strategies); (2) difference(s), if any, between female and male students' reading strategies use; and (3) students reported use of any other strategies which are not included in the SORS. Findings reveal that Algerian ESP students, as medium users of reading strategies in general, tend to use Problem-solving more than other categories of reading strategies; the absence of significant differences between males and females reported use of reading strategies; meanwhile, students report use of some strategies other than those mentioned in Mokhtari and Sheorey's Survey. Consequently, an adapted version of the SORS is designed to fit the Algerian context of EFL for specific purposes.
Given the acknowledged and undeniable advantages of literature in language education, it has been integrated into EFL curricula for undergraduate students as an essential subject. In the Algerian English departments before the reform introduced in the last two decades (the Licence, Master, doctorate system), literature used to have a privileged status in terms of the number of courses and number of classes or tutorials. However, after the reform, the importance of literature and the lion’s share that it used to have in the EFL Bachelor of Arts course regressed in favor of more specialized subjects. Such a reform has only worsened the state of the art of EFL literature teaching, which was already in a deplored state according to the will be cited studies. This article aims at pointing at the primary defects or malfunctioning of the first-year literature course by answering the question: what are the main flaws of the first-year EFL literature course? In order to answer this question, the article starts with a review of the whole literature course package, i.e., objective, content, methodology, and assessment. More importantly, to go beyond mere evaluation and criticism, the article ends by suggesting an alternative course that adopts task-based language teaching as a methodology. The proposed task-based literature course attempts to overcome the observed weaknesses or the inefficiencies of the actual course by matching the course objective, content, methodology, and assessment to students’ needs and aptitudes.
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