Research On The Gender Representation In Textbooks From The Perspective Of Hidden Curriculum

School textbooks,as the main carrier of knowledge,are the most essential teaching materials and the fundamental basis of education.The textbooks embody the value system of a country and nation,and impart the knowledge,culture,concepts and so on to the students in an authoritative way,so that students can absorb and acquire the corresponding knowledge and skills and so forth,and form values.The teaching effect conveyed by the teaching material through the hidden curriculum is subtle,infectious,concealed and long-lasting,so it is worthy of in-depth study.Driven by the promotion of the concept of gender equality in teaching materials,gender representation in teaching materials,as an implicit course,is one of the main research areas of English teaching materials and reforms.Compared with studies abroad in this field,the domestic studies are not comprehensive and scientific enough in dimensions and research tools.From the perspective of hidden curriculum,this study is to explore the gender representation of the compulsory textbooks and optional compulsory textbooks of Senior English For China published by People’s Education Press in 2019,through analyzing male-to-female ratios and frequency,the gender roles in illustrations and texts and the linguistic sexism in the texts.Instead of the generally manual methods of analysis employed in many previous studies,corpora and modern software Ant Conc are used to frequency counts,collocation,and so on.The research results show that the sexism of this set of textbooks has improved compared to previous studies in general.For example,there is an increase in father’s representation in family illustrations and women are not just represented by housewives.Women are not limited in career roles.Also,there are no lack of women in the sports illustrations.The status of women in the texts has been significantly improved in terms of occupation,society,family and personality.And the outstanding contributions of women in some exceptional fields are no longer ignored.But there are still many gender stereotypes and sexism in the gender representation of this set of textbooks.The research results show that the proportions of genders in illustrations and texts are imbalanced.In all dimensions,the frequency of males exceeds that of females,especially in the dimension of the outstanding figures in the text.Gender stereotypes in illustrations and texts still exist.The number of female elites in the workplace is significantly less than that of males.In the perspective of social characterization,women are trend to be the victims,while men are helpers.Meanwhile,the described personalities of the two sexes also show that women are more vulnerable,while men are stronger.Linguistic sexism also appears in the whole set,mainly shown in the masculine generic terms,male-first word order of paired words,gender marked words and the asymmetric addressing titles of males and females.This study analyzes the potential impact of sexism and sexual stereotypes under the perspective of hidden curriculum theory,and raises some suggestions for education department,textbook editors,teachers and students,and also points out the lack of this research.There is the hope that later studies can discuss the gender representation in textbooks more deeply and comprehensively to guarantee the gender equality in teaching and textbooks as soon as possible.