A Corpus-Based Research On Gender Representation In Pep Senior High School English Textbooks (2019)

With the accelerating advancement of social and economic development,gender issues have increasingly attracted public attention,and gender equality has become a goal to commit to and a universal value to adhere to for many civilized counties.China also listed gender equality in education as one of the principal objectives of the China Women’s Development Programme(2021-2030).As a crucial medium of teaching and an important source of teaching content,teaching materials play an essential role in students’ learning process,spreading knowledge to them and profoundly influencing their social values and ideologies.With the implementation of the new college entrance examination reform,an increasing number of provinces will start using the new set of senior high school English textbooks published by People’s Education Press(PEP)in 2019.It is of great theoretical significance and practical value to investigate gender representation in this new set of English textbooks.Compared with studies abroad in this field,domestic studies are not comprehensive and scientific enough in dimensions and research tools.Applying corpus linguistics and based on a self-built corpus,the present study takes senior high school English textbooks(Compulsory 1-3)published by People’s Education Press in2019 as the research subjects,trying to investigate gender representation and explore whether there are issues of unbalanced gender representation,sexist language,and gender stereotypes in this set of textbooks.The present study examines three aspects of gender representation: the frequency of appearance of females and males,linguistic evidence of sexist language,and depiction of gender roles.The results show that the textbook compilers have noticed the issues of gender and made efforts to avoid gender discrimination.For instance,they use gender-neutral vocabulary and gender-inclusive pronouns to refer to people in general or when the gender of the referent is unknown,apply the neutral title “Ms.” to address women,and emphasize the depiction of women’s accomplishments in the occupational area.These improvements indicate a progressive move towards gender equality in textbooks and weaken traditional gender stereotypes towards the female occupation.Meanwhile,the results also illustrate that the gender representation of female and male is unbalanced,and there are sexist language and gender stereotyping in some aspects of the textbooks.Frequency study of female and male occurrences shows that the appearances of males outnumber females.The results of linguistic analysis prove that sexist language indeed exists in the textbooks,covering the generic use of “man”and “he”,the use of gender-marked vocabulary,the male terms always preceding the female ones when both mentioned,and the asymmetric addressing titles of males and females.Concerning the description of gender roles,there are unbalanced representation and gender-stereotyped depiction of women’s characteristics and roles in the family and occupational area.The portrayal of male characters is richer and more varied,and female characters are relatively socially and psychologically limited.Females are portrayed less positively and are described as mainly related to their passive emotions.There still exists gender stereotyping in the analyzed textbooks based on the traditional point of view of,“men work outside,women stay at home”,in that women are more domestically active than men and still play the role of housewives while fathers are always busy.Furthermore,males are represented as engaging in a broader range of occupational/social roles with high social status and salaries.This research is helpful in exploring gender representation,and it should positively affect the future compilation of English language textbooks and teachers’ daily instruction.Furthermore,this thesis points out the current study’s limitations to give new insights for future research on gender study in English language textbooks.