A Study Of Gender Roles In TCSOL Textbooks

With the advent of the era of knowledge economy and the awakening of women’s subject consciousness,gender equality in the field of education has attracted more and more attention.Teaching materials are an important part of realizing educational equity.Therefore,how to infiltrate the awareness of gender equality into teaching materials has attracted the attention of many domestic scholars.In the field of Chinese and English,the research started earlier and paid more attention.However,in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,the problem of gender role in teaching materials is often ignored.This paper will discuss this issue in detail based on the new perspective of gender dimension.This paper takes New Concept Chinese and HSK Standard Course two sets of comprehensive textbooks with wide applicability and relatively new dates as the research objects.On the theoretical basis,mainly with the help of gender theory and multimodal discourse analysis theory,the text and illustrations of textbooks are investigated.Through quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis,the author finds that the two sets of textbooks have serious problems in the following aspects: First,the gender ratio of characters and the frequency of appearances in the two sets of textbooks are unbiased.Second,in terms of the characters’ occupational identities,the two sets of textbooks for Chinese as a foreign language both reflect obvious gender biases.The occupational types and occupational levels of men are much higher than that of women,and women are even completely isolated in some occupational scenarios.Third,gender roles are still unable to break the barriers of gender stereotypes in terms of activity form and space.Women prefer more indoor activities,and the activity space is mainly concentrated in family occasions and commercial consumption occasions,while men prefer outdoor activities and rarely appear in the family field.Fourth,by analyzing the meaning of representation,interaction,and composition of illustration modalities,the study found that the above problems also exist in illustrations.After examining the gender profiles of the two sets of textbooks,and then comparing them,it was found that although there are great differences in the writing concept,applicable objects and style structure of New Concept Chinese and HSK Standard Course,the gender differences between the two sets of textbooks are quite different.There is a relatively significant homogeneity in the issues,but the gender imbalance and prejudice of the HSK Standard Course are deeper.In this regard,the author further explored the differences in the level of problems between the two sets of textbooks,and found that the gender ratio of the editors,the textbooks’ s original intention of writing and the source of the text will affect the gender balance of the textbook.According to the source of the problem,the author puts forward specific suggestions for the improvement of teaching materials: the editors and reviewers of teaching materials should have the awareness of gender equality,and a certain proportion of women should be stipulated among the above-mentioned personnel,and the personnel who formulate,validate and check the teaching materials should be gender indicators.In addition,when teachers choose teaching materials,they should take gender equity as one of the criteria for selecting teaching materials,consciously control stereotypes,and establish an educational and teaching model without gender bias.