A Study On Gender Representation Between NSEFC 2004 And NSEFC 2019

Students in senior high school are in a critical period of developing their gender awareness.Gender ideology embedded in textbooks,the main teaching and learning material,would exert influence on senior high school students.This thesis is a comparative study on gender representation between two sets of textbooks-New Senior English for China(NSEFC)published by People’s Education Press(PEP)in year 2004 and year 2019 from the perspective of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis.The theoretical foundation comes from Halliday’s Systemic Function Grammar in which the ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning and textual meaning of language are highlighted and Kress&Van Leeuwen’ Visual Grammar which puts forward three meanings of images:representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Through both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,this study aims to explore how language and illustrations convey gender ideology in the selected textbooks so as to provide some suggestions to the textbook compilers and users.The researching findings show that:First,in terms of language,quantitative research shows that male characters outnumber female characters both in NSEFC 2004 and NSEFC 2019.Research also shows that men take various occupations which usually enjoy relatively high social statues.Females’ occupations are limited to less than ten kinds with teacher the most common occupation.Qualitative research based on Halliday’s Systemic Function Grammar reveals that females tend to be pessimistic and inactive when confronted with difficulties,while males are optimistic and actively seek solutions of problems.Second,in terms of illustrations,male images take up a dominated position based on the quantitative analysis.Qualitative analysis on the foundation of Kress&Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar indicates that,both in NSEFC 2004 and NSEFC 2019,males are usually depicted from low angle and are put in a rather important position in illustrations.Males are more likely to initiate a conversation in interpersonal communication and offer information.While females are usually represented from high angle and more of information seekers.Males have more power than females but in NSEFC 2019,the difference between males and females about power narrows.Finally,in NSEFC 2004 and NSEFC 2019,the interaction between language and illustration forms many kinds of relationships such as highlighting relationship,primary and secondary relationship,and coordination relationship.In these relationships,complex gender representation is reflected.Gender representation is reasonable in some relationships.But gender imbalance and gender stereotype can also be found.Men,for example,is one party of gender,but often only men are used to refer to the whole meaning of gender in some concepts such as traveling,rescue,etc.Gender representation in textbooks is one aspect that is easy to be ignored.Compared with NSEFC 2004,gender representation has been improved in NSEFC 2019.Textbook compilers are consequently advised to pay more attention to the gender representation in textbooks.Teachers should wisely deal with the gender issues to guide students in a proper way when using the textbooks.Further studies are suggested to be done to reveal the gender representation of other modalities and more textbooks.