A Study On Gender Representation In Ren’ai Project English Textbooks

The contemporary society is a historical period that female consciousness awakes and female roles are quite lively. Along with it, how to integrate the gender perspective into education has become a hot topic in the field of educational research. However, a large number of domestic and foreign researches have shown that a deficiency of female roles and serious gender stereotypes have always been the most sensitive problems in textbooks, which are also prone to be ignored. School textbooks as important mass media and a gender socialization agent play a crucial role in determining students’views on females and males in society. The gender bias in textbooks can reproduce and reinforce social inequalities, affect students’identification with their own gender roles, especially students in junior high schools who are in the critical period of forming the gender sense, and make social gender bias rationalize and legalize. However, domestic scholars haven’t done enough researches on gender bias in foreign language textbooks yet. Therefore, to research on gender bias in English textbooks is necessary, because English, as a compulsory subject in secondary schools, constitutes an important part of the curriculums in China.This thesis takes Ren’ai Project English textbooks published by Beijing Education Press as the object of study. In this research, document method is used to know the theoretical bases, criteria and existing achievements of this kind of research at home and abroad; statistical method and content analysis method are applied to do qualitative and quantitative research on gender presentation in the texts and illustrations. The study focuses on such items as the frequency of males to females in the illustrations, female and male public figures, first place occurrence or frequency of first-place occurrences of words attributed to females and males, women and men in social roles, both genders in domestic roles, and their value and feelings. The findings indicate that lots of contents in the textbooks present stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, i.e. gender stereotypes. The writer analyzes the causes and effects of gender problems in Ren’ai Project English, recommends some feasible strategies to combat sexism, and draws a conclusion of the whole paper and points out the theoretical significance and practical value of the study.