Study On Gender Roles Of Primary Language Teaching Materials

Throughout the history of language education, there were many studies about language teaching material; but a variety of studies were focused on the analysis of the surface materials, such as the evolution of the teaching materials, discussion on the formation, evaluation of the language teaching materials, etc. Therefore, the necessary research on the deep-rooted ideology of the textbooks and its social carrying was ignored. Based on that, the study of the gender role in the textbooks was weaker.The fundamental nature of language is instrumentality and humanity. Language teaching materials have the responsibility to cultivate children to be sound individuals, which contains helping pupils build correct and equal sex awareness for healthy and comprehensive development. Sex mentioned here, including the distinction between physical and psychological. Every child is given a physical sex in the fall to earth with no choices; but gender awareness is formed in its growth process, interacting with the environmental impacts. A large part of environmental factors is education. The primary school language teaching material, also refers to more formal textbook, is the text which firstly comes into contact for children, carrying the ideology and intention of the ruler to spread the mainstream values,. Owning to the instrumentality and humanity, the selected texts in the primary language materials bear the task to teach students to listen, speak, read and write, and help students develop the basic language proficiency. Not only confined to that, primary language teaching material is also assumed to bear the important task to guide children to form their gender and equality awareness. Through the changes of China’s educational reform, it could be seen that although the materials have already been reformed through all aspects; however, the implicit gender discrimination and the obvious gender stereotypes in the textbooks have not been effectively improved. The wave of the basic education curriculum reform is still in strong forward. Under the impetus of this wave, reformers focused more on this issue. In this study, grade1-6textbooks of the primary language published by People’s Education Press are selected as analysis objects; a variety of gender images appeared in the text were analyzed. A gender perspective, text and quantitative analysis will be used to calculate, describe and analyze for the gender stereotyped image and gender proportion in this serial of teaching materials. In addition, analysis will be on specific characters’role playing in the text by giving examples in order to make clear the distribution of gender roles in the textbooks and the impact of gender stereotypes for the teacher’s teaching and children’s gender awareness, which will provide appropriate recommendations for the redact of primary language teaching material, making the perspective of gender role valued as a new entry point for curriculum reform and compilation of teaching materials.