Discursive Construction And Change Of Role Models In Pep Senior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of CDA

As an important force to convey virtue and provide value orientation for the people,role-model is a widely used medium in learning and publicity.It is of great significance to convey the mainstream ideology to the people and guide them to establish correct values with the help of role models.As the main carrier of teaching content,textbooks carry values and ideology as well as an important channel to spread knowledge and values,which determines that the cultivation of emotion and values can not be ignored in the content selection of foreign language textbooks.As the most authoritative and experienced publishing house in China,the textbooks published by the people’s education press not only shoulder the function of “teaching”,but also shoulder the important task of “educating people”.Reading texts often occupy the largest proportion of each module in PEP English textbooks.The texts describing role models often construct different images of role models through various discourse strategies with different discourse and convey the mainstream social consciousness implicitly.It is an important genre of CDA.From the perspective of CDA,based on the DHA analysis method,this thesis takes4 sets of PEP senior high school English textbooks from 1981 to 2019 as the corpus for critical discourse analysis,which explores the changes and discourse strategies of role models in the textbooks,and reveal the similarities and differences of moral values conveyed by the image of role models in the textbooks and its social background.Through the analysis,it is found that: first,the development and change of the image of role models in textbooks is closely related to the development of China’s society and economy.Second,although some changes have taken place in the image of role models in different versions of textbooks,male role models are dominated,and gender bias and stereotypes against women still exist.In terms of occupation,the proportion of industry elites in fields such as “scientists” and “athletes” is high,and the proportion of civilian role models is relatively low.In terms of theme,“dedication”,“innovation” and other social mainstream values account for the highest proportion,and improving “responsibility” has become the main melody of moral education in textbooks.At the same time,the image of role models began to show a diversified trend.Third,when constructing the image of role models,the textbook comprehensively uses the nomination strategy of “third person”,the predicate strategy of “positive semantic rhyme” and the perspective strategy of “third perspective”,to achieve the objective and authoritative presentation effect of the image of role models,express the praise of the role models,and build an objective and positive image of role models.This thesis attempts to enrich the categories of CDA and provides a new perspective for foreign language textbook research,pay attention to the social dimension significance of the research of foreign language textbooks,and improve the social responsibility of textbook writers and researchers.