Research Of Gender Bias Of Foreign Language English Textbooks

As an important source of teaching content,textbooks are an important means for students to understand the world and understand life.A well-designed textbook should not only improve students’ language skills,but also convey social cultures,social values and social ethics.It can be seen that the teaching materials play an extremely important role in the process of students’ socialization and gender awareness forming.Domestic and foreign scholars have carried out a lot of surveys on this,and they all conclude that there are gender biases in textbooks.However,the research on high school English textbooks in China mostly focuses on the textbooks of the People’s Education Edition and the Beijing Normal University edition,and lacks the research on the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Institute Edition high school English textbooks.Therefore,the author decided to use the literature method,text analysis and quantitative and qualitative research methods to study the high school English textbooks from the two dimensions of content and language.In terms of content,it was examined:1.Whether there is an imbalance between male and female presentation frequency and whether it neglects women in the textbook illustrations and texts.2.What roles do men and women play in family and professional situations,and what are their behavioral characteristics.In terms of language: 1.Two-sex adjectives: What adjectives are used in the textbook to describe the sexes,and whether there is gender bias.2.Gender title:What is the order of the two sexes at the same time,whether there is a male pronoun he and its variants to refer to the situation of the two sexes.The research results show that gender-biased phenomenon still exists in the foreign research version of high school English textbook.1.Content research:(1)Frequency study of male and female occurrences: including the frequency of occurrence of male and female in the illustrations,the frequency of appearance of the protagonists and prominent figures in the texts.It was found that there was a situation inwhich the male figure was overexposed in both the illustration and the text,and the phenomenon of female figure was lacking.(2)Gender role research: including the scenes of the two sexes in the illustrations,the roles and behaviors of men and women,and the professional roles of men and women in the text.The results show that the textbook focuses on portraying the image of men in the workplace and weakening the image of women in the workplace.Men are more engaged in athletes,actors,businessmen,police,scientists and other socially advanced jobs,while women are mostly engaged in service industries,such as nurses,sales staff and so on.2.Language research: this includes,in the character description text,adjectives and the character title researching.It was found that when both sexes appeared at the same time,the textbook generally placed the male pronouns in front of the paired structure;and the case where the pronouns he and its variants were used to refer to the two sexes occurred continually.It can be seen that the gender bias problem still exists in the foreign language English textbooks,which is not conducive to the formation of an objective and fair gender perspective.It needs to attract the attention of all sectors of society,especially the textbook writing department,teachers and students.