A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Gender Representation Of English Textbook Images

As the main teaching materials,textbooks carry not only a rigorous and scientific knowledge system,but also rich cultural connotation and social ideology that have been repeatedly strengthened by external authorities.Senior high school students are at an important stage of the formation of gender concepts,and the gender awareness contained in textbooks has a subtle and far-reaching impact on them.However,gender opposition,gender bias,gender stereotype and other gender issues still exist in a considerable number of current textbooks.It’s an important topic in the current educational research field to study the gender issues in the current textbooks,making the concept of gender equity one of the factors in evaluating textbooks,and empowering teachers and students with correct gender awareness.The previous studies mainly focused on the gender narrative in the text mode system of textbooks,but ignored the image mode system as the most intuitive way for students to obtain information in the learning process and its effective function such as information interpretation,knowledge presentation and quality cultivation.Therefore,this research uses the feminism and the visual grammar theory as the theoretical basis,makes the multimodal critical discourse analysis as the research approach,regards the 2019 edition of high school English textbooks widely used nationwide by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,as well as high school English teachers and students who use this series of textbooks for teaching and learning activities as the research objects and uses the research method that combines content analysis and survey questionnaire to propose and intend to answer the following three research questions:(1)What is the distribution of the number and types of gender roles in the image system of FLTRP’s 2019 high school English textbook?(2)How does the image system of FLTRP’s 2019 high school English textbook present and express gender role information and construct gender meaning from the linguistic perspective?(3)What are the perceptions,attitudes,and teaching and learning status of gender concepts presented in the image system of FLTRP’s 2019 high school English textbooks among high school English teachers and students?The content analysis is mainly carried out from four dimensions of “ the number and type of gender roles in textbook images”,“representational meaning”,“interactive meaning”and “compositional meaning”.The results shows that:(1)the frequency of male images is higher.Male roles mostly appear in social scenes,while female roles mostly appear in family scenes.The number of employed male roles is larger and their social status is higher.There are still traditional gender stereotypes and gender bias in concrete activity types;(2)The two gender roles have equal opportunities to actively carry out image information transmission and meaning construction to act as the actor and phenomenon vector,but there are still some gender stereotypes in the specific performance content;(3)Males tend to perform as providing meaning and are more likely to be providers of information,services or emotions,while females tend to perform as demanding meaning and are more likely to ask information,services or emotional recognition from readers.And the numbers and types of single gender male images presented by high angle are more than that of single gender female images,the interaction status of former is higher;(4)The two gender roles appear in the important information(right)position and the center position of the image averagely,and there’s no significant gender difference in the composition meaning of the images with both sexes.The empirical research is mainly based on teachers and students.The results of the questionnaire show that although most teachers and students agree that the performance of gender images in English textbook images has a certain impact on the cultivation of students’ gender awareness,they pay little attention to it,and the current situation of gender education in senior high school English class teaching isn’t so optimistic.Therefore,there’s a certain degree of male discourse hegemony in this set of textbooks’ image mode system and its implicit gender ideology is unfair,and there’re also some gender-oriented problems in its application of teaching practice.It’s suggested that the compilers of English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School and high school English textbooks should pay more attention to the gender issues in textbooks.When using textbooks,senior high school English teachers should objectively understand and properly handle the gender ideology in it,so as to guide students more appropriately and implement the gender equality education better.