This article reports my study on linguistic sexism in current Vietnamese upper secondary school English language textbooks: Tiếng Anh 10, Tiếng Anh 11 and Tiếng Anh 12. The study was aimed at finding out how often linguistic sexism occurs in these textbooks and uncovering the hidden messages conveyed through this linguistic sexism. | LINGUISTIC SEXISM IN CURRENT UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS: TIẾNG ANH 10, TIẾNG ANH 11 AND TIẾNG ANH 12 Nguyen Doan Canh* Dong Thanh High School, Quang Yen, Quang Ninh, Vietnam Received 28 May 2016 Revised 08 November 2017; Accepted 23 November 2017 Abstract: This article reports my study on linguistic sexism in current Vietnamese upper secondary school English language textbooks: Tiếng Anh 10, Tiếng Anh 11 and Tiếng Anh 12. The study was aimed at finding out how often linguistic sexism occurs in these textbooks and uncovering the hidden messages conveyed through this linguistic sexism. The results of the study showed that linguistic sexism occurs rather often in the three English textbooks and through it the messages of women’s low status are conveyed. Keywords: linguistic sexism, textbook, frequency, hidden message 1. Introduction Once I taught my 11th grade students about Neil Armstrong, a famous American astronaut, a student asked me: ‘Why must it be MAN, but not WOMAN’ when she read in Textbook Tiếng Anh 11 Neil Armstrong’s quotation: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’ (Tiếng Anh 11, p. 174). Though I tried to explain to this girl that a man here in this sentence was not a particular man and that it was used to refer to all the human beings, she still did not accept. After the lesson, I thought more about her question and began to agree with her that the sentence was problematic because the quotation seems to reflect the invisibility of females by containing the words man and mankind. Neil Armstrong’s use of such words as man and mankind for all the human beings may make people feel that women are not present in the achievement. This is a representation of sexism or sex discrimination in the English language. Sexism in life is various in forms and different at levels. It is probably most readily * Tel.: 84-988615406 Email: nguyendoancanh@ associated with economic issues, such as equal pay for equal .
