Looking Into Gender Bias In Chinese Primary English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Representation Of Social Actors

This research attempts to explore whether gender bias exists in Chinese primary English textbooks on the basis of a self-built corpus OYPPETC,which includes 3 sub-corpora:OPETC,YPETC and PPETC.The corpus was compiled with materials from three sets of the most widely used primary English textbooks in China,Yinlin Primary English,Oxford Primary English(Shanghai Edition)and PEP Primary English.This study is based on the framework of the Representation of Social Actors proposed by Theo van Leeuwen.Representation of genders was investigated through five categories:Inclusion,Functionalization,Role allocation,Nomination and Association.Results show that there is gender biased representation of females and males in OYPPETC.First,the inclusion of females and males differs in various activities.Females are included more in activities related to shopping,people's well-beings and indoor activities,while males are included more in sports-related activities,recreational activities and outdoor activities.Second,males are functionalized as having more prestigious and higher level occupations and given subjective evaluation that help improve their image and status,while females have limited kinds of occupations that are consistent with traditional stereotypes.Also,more females are nominated in informal ways compared with males,which indicates females' close relationship with children,while more males are nominated in formal ways,which represented males as being respected by children.However,in OYPPETC,author's awareness of gender equality can also be found as the number of females and males endowed with active roles in dialogues is basically balanced and females and males are frequently associated as groups.In this research,the representation of females and males in each sub-corpus is also analyzed respectively to explore the characteristics of each sub-corpus.Results show that Oxford Primary English(Shanghai Edition)focuses on the representation of females as more females are included in OPETC and more females are endowed with active roles in dialogues compared with males.The representation of females and males in Yilin Primary English is relatively balanced as the frequency of females' and males' occurrence is balanced and the number of types of occupations that females engaged in is equal to that males engaged in.Meanwhile,PEP Primary English focuses on the representation of males as more males are represented in PPETC and males are found engaged in more types of occupations.Also,more males are endowed with active roles in dialogues in PPETC.This study then provides a further analysis of linguistic realizations of gender bias in the textbooks with an attempt to explore the potential influence on students,and makes suggestions on how to reduce and thus eliminate the gender bias in textbooks from the perspective of compilation and use of textbooks.