A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gender Representation In FLTRP Junior High School English Textbooks

Gender equality is an essential issue of common concern to the international community,and education is the best way to achieve gender equality.As the main source of teaching content,textbooks play a crucial role in students’ socialization and gender consciousness.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis on the junior high school English textbooks published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press to explore whether their gender representation is balanced.Based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Kress & van Leeuwen’s visual grammar,this study conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis from verbal mode and visual mode of gender representation in FLTRP junior high school English textbooks to explore whether gender representation is balanced.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods and mainly answers three questions:(1)What are the differences in the frequency of representation of both genders in FLTRP junior high school English textbooks?(2)What are the differences between representation of both genders in the verbal mode in FLTRP junior high school English textbooks?(3)What are the differences between representation of both genders in the visual mode in FLTRP junior high school English textbooks?The results show that:(1)In both texts and illustrations,males appear slightly more frequently than females,and outstanding females are significantly less than males;Males far outnumber females in both quantity and type of jobs,while females are more involved in family life;In terms of the frequency and distribution of adjectives and adverbs,the textbooks usually use “healthy”,“smart”,“brave” and other words to describe males,while “beautiful”,“friendly”,“shy” and other words are used to describe females;Males usually appear first in paired words containing both genders,and masculine generic use and address reflecting female marital status still exist.(2)In verbal mode,as for ideational function,females tend to participate in mental processes,while males are more likely to participate in material processes;as for interpersonal function,males use more imperative mood in mood system and tend to use high value modal auxiliary verbs in modality system;as for textual function,females are sometimes ignored in the process of using thematic structure to promote information flow.(3)In visual mode,as for representational meaning,males mostly appear as actors and phenomena in the illustrations containing both genders;as for interactive meaning,contact,social distance,and perspective all make it easier for viewers to connect and interact with males;as for compositional meaning,the textbooks tend to place males on the right side of the left and right composition as well as in the centre of the image in the centre and margin composition,so that viewers are more likely to notice male characters.This study has implications for both compilation and use of the textbooks.On the one hand,compilers should take more notice of gender representation in the textbooks.On the other hand,teachers should give students appropriate guidance to help them establish equal gender concepts.