A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Approach Towards Gender Roles In Junior High School EFL Textbooks

This thesis is a gender study on junior high school EFL textbooks,Go for It,published by People's Education Press(PEP)in 2013,from the perspective of multimodal critical discourse analysis(MCDA).MCDA(Machin & Mayr,2012)considers that images and texts can work together to create meaning and reveal the ideology hidden in the seemingly neutral images and texts.The purposes of this study are to explore whether there is gender imbalance in the illustrations and the accompanying verbal texts and how images and verbal texts combine to construct gender roles in the selected English textbooks.This research applies the analytical perspective of MCDA by combining Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar,to investigate the data,selected illustrations and their accompanying verbal texts in this series of textbooks.Both quantitative method and qualitative method are applied into the study.The analysis includes two steps.Firstly,quantitative method is used to analyze the frequencies of male and female and their occurrence in social and domestic circumstance.Secondly,qualitative method is utilized to present how visual image and verbal text construct gender roles by using the framework of visual grammar and systemic functional grammar.The findings show that(1)female roles outnumber male roles a little,with no significant difference;(2)there are more female characters with job than males,with no significant difference,and females occur more frequently in the relationship with family members,while males have wider range of occupations than females,and the people with powerful jobs are always men;(3)in the framework of visual grammar,there are more females as actor and phenomenon than males.And more females are arranged in the right and center position in illustrations.Males with high angle are more than females with high angle.As for the number of demanding image,females are a little more than males;(4)image and verbal text are complementary to each other in the construction of gender roles.To sum up,although there are some differences of the two genders existing in the selected textbooks,the compilers have tried to avoid gender imbalance to a large extent.The results of the present study are not only practical for textbook compilers,but also for teachers and students to build up awareness of gender ideology.Its theoretical significance lies in revealing the gender roles hidden in textbooks,providing the usefulness of MCDA in analysis of multimodal discourse,and offering a new perspective in gender study of EFL textbooks in China.