Farhana Shahzad, Teaching Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS) has published a book titled, Promotion of Gender Stereotypes through the English Curriculum in 2018 by Scholar's Press publishing house.
The corpus analysis was piloted to detect the gender stereotyped construction in Intermediate English Compulsory Textbooks of Pakistan. "Fostering gender-biased material indelibly scars the thinking of the young impressionable learners, and they are demotivated by such stereotypes presented in the textbooks," (Frank,F.W., & Treichler,P.A.1989). In order to gauge the prevalence of these biased constructions, formative indicators were researched from the literature reviewed. In addition, computer aided programmes were employed for detecting and counting the indicators while manual analysis was undertaken for scrutinising and linguistically analysing the content. Numerous occurrences of the indicators depicting stereotypes were surfaced. Females were portrayed in stereotypical occupational roles and were confined to their homes. In comparison, males were predominantly engaged in more productive and higher status professions. The corpus analysis unearthed the propagation of blatant sexism through male hegemony compliant to the patriarchal set-up prevalent in the region. To mitigate the perpetuation of deleterious typecasting, reinvented gender positions need to be incorporated.
Ms. Farhana Shahzad is a Teaching Fellow in the Writing and Communication stream in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, at MGSHSS. She is a Master of Philosophy in English Language Teaching from Kinnaird College for Women University. Gender studies has been her particular area of interest and her MPhil thesis was based on a corpus analysis to detect gender stereotypes in the Intermediate English Curriculum. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from National College of Arts. Though, graduating with a degree in Architecture, she has had a passion for teaching English language which materialised after she completed a Post Graduate Diploma in English Language Teaching and topped the course. Prior to joining LUMS, she has worked with Beaconhouse National University as Adjunct Faculty. She has also been associated with LUMS as Adjunct Faculty in 2014 and 2015.
To read more on her book, click here.
