MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY HỒ NỮ NHƯ Ý GENDER REPRESENTATION IN SOLUTIONS ELEMENTARY TEXTBOOKS: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 Supervisor: Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN HỒ NỮ NHƯ Ý SỰ THỂ HIỆN GIỚI TÍNH TRONG GIÁO TRÌNH SOLUTIONS ELEMENTARY: PHÂN TÍCH ĐA PHƯƠNG THỨC Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Mã số: 8220201 Người hướng dẫn: PGS. Nguyễn Thị Thu Hiền i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby certify that this thesis ‘Gender representation in Solutions Elementary textbooks: A multimodal analysis’ has not been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution, and that it does not contain material previously published or written by another person, except where due acknowledgement has been made in the text. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study could not have been accomplished without the invaluable assistance of individuals and organizations to whom I feel profoundly indebted.
First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and sincere appreciation for my supervisor, Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien, who has supported me throughout my thesis with her endless patience, gentle encouragement, constructive comments and valuable materials. Without her, this thesis would not have been completed. Secondly, I am also grateful to all the lecturers of the relevant courses for their valuable lectures and discussions, which provide essential insights for this thesis.
Thirdly, I would like to express my special thanks for the Department of Foreign Languages for giving us the permission to carry out this project. Last but not least, this would be a golden opportunity for me to exhibit my endless love and indebtedness to my family who are the tower of hope and strength for during the time I carried out this study. iii ABSTRACT The growing popularity of English teaching has been paralleled by the growing investigation of gender representation and gender stereotyping in ESL/EFL textbooks. The aim of this study is to uncover how males and females are represented in in the Solutions Elementary students’ books.
To achieve this aim, the Systemic Functional Grammar by Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) and Grammar of Visual Design by Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) were employed to explore the experiential meaning of the written texts and representational meaning of the images. This study was conducted with both quantitative and qualitative methods. On the one hand, the text analysis reveals that males are more visible than females in the important roles of Actor, Carrier/Identified, Senser, Sayer and Behaver. Males are generally portrayed as being more competent, creative, and dominant than females, and many other gender stereotypes are perpetuated.
On the other hand, the image analysis shows that males enjoy higher visibility than females yet with small differences. Many stereotypes perpetuated in the 2nd edition are subject to rejection in the 3rd edition, which might indicate the textbook authors’ growing recognition of the gender stereotyping issue. These results highlight a need for teachers and learners to pay more attention to gender stereotyping conveyed in the ESL textbooks. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP.
III TABLE OF CONTENTS. IV ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS. VI LIST OF TABLES. VII LIST OF FIGURES.
IX CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY. SCOPE OF THE STUDY. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY.
STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS. 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Systemic Functional Grammar.
Grammar of Visual Design. Gender and textbooks. Gender representation in EFL/ESL textbooks. Collection of written texts.
Collection of images. VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY. 35 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. REPRESENTATION OF MALES AND FEMALES IN WRITTEN TEXTS.
Linguistic-gendered clauses. Distribution of process types in linguistic-gendered clauses. Representation of males and females in material processes. Representation of males and females in relational clauses.
Representation of males and females in mental clauses. Representation of males and females in verbal clauses. Representation of males and females in behavioral clauses. Representation of males and females in different social contexts.
Discussion on the findings of gender representation in the written texts. VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF MALES AND FEMALES. Distribution of narrative processes in images. Representation of males and females in actional processes.
Representation of males and females in reactional processes. Representation of males and females in verbal processes. Representation of males and females in mental processes. Representation of males and females in different social contexts.
Discussion on the findings of gender representation in the images. 80 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH .94 vi ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS [a] Abbreviations READ Reading comprehension texts GRAM Grammar examples and exercises DIA Dialogues [b] Conventions - Boldface is used to mark the first use of technical terms or to highlight the focus point. - Italics is used for examples.
- Underline is used to mark the words or phrases that are being discussed. For example: [E3-626] She likes Leonard and Sheldon. [M] The phrase Leonard and Sheldon is underlined to show the positioning of males as Goal. vii LIST OF TABLES Table Name Table Page 2.1 Terminology for the three metafunctions 14 4.1 Distribution of linguistic-gendered clauses 36 4.2 Distribution of process types 38 4.3 Distribution of male/female Actor in the 2nd edition 39 4.4 Distribution of male/female Actor in the 3rd edition 40 4.5 Distribution of male/female Carrier/Token in the 2nd edition 42 4.6 Male/female Carrier/Token in subtypes of relational processes in 42 the 2nd edition 4.7 Distribution of male/female Carrier/Token in the 3rd edition 43 4.8 Male/female Carrier/Token in subtypes of relational processes in 44 the 3rd edition 4.9 Distribution of male/female Senser sections of 2nd edition 45 4.10 Distribution of subtypes of mental processes in the 2nd edition.11 Distribution of male/female Senser in the 3rd edition 46 4.12 Distribution of subtypes of mental processes in the 3rd edition 47 4.13 Distribution of male/female Sayer 48 4.14 Distribution of male/female Behavers 50 4.15 Distribution of male and female participant roles in the 2nd 55 edition 4.16 Distribution of male and female participant roles in the 3rd 60 edition 4.17 The distribution of male and female participants in the three 63 sections 4.18 The proportion of males and females in important participant 63 viii Table Name Table Page roles 4.19 Distribution of narrative processes 65 4.20 Frequency of males and females as participants in actional 66 process 4.21 Frequency of males and females as participants in reactional 71 process 4.22 Distribution of males and females in the participant roles in the 81 2nd edition 4.23 Distribution of males and females in the participant roles in the 84 3rd edition ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Name Figure Page 2.1 The grammar experience: types of process in English 8 3.1 Male and female portrayals in household chores 52 4.2 Male and female portrayals in occupational roles 53 4.3 Male and female portrayals in hobbies and interests 54 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.
RATIONALE Inflamed by the feminist movement in the 1960s and the evolution of women’s roles in society, the investigation of gender stereotypes has been receiving considerable academic attention. Against this backdrop emerged a particular stream of literature - the research in language and gender, which became a domain of linguistics in the 1970s and has grown vigorously since then. A sound literature on gender portrayals in advertising, brochures, films, cartoons, songs has developed, using linguistic approaches for the elucidation of stereotypical depictions, such as systemic functional analysis (Dai, 2015; Choudhry & Chaudhary, 2020), and multimodal discourse analysis (Sun & Luo, 2016; Tehseem et al. The continuous examination of gender representation in these sources is justified by the fact that they can play a constitutive role in the viewers or listeners' gender construction and possibly contribute to the promotion of gender inequality (Gauntlett, 2008).
Another major influencer in our gender construction comes from textbooks. The place of textbooks in socializing learners cannot be overemphasized, especially as textbooks are often viewed by learners as authoritative and therefore have the potential to influence an impressionable audience (Lee & Collins, 2010). The growing popularity of English teaching has been paralleled by the growing investigation of gender representation and gender stereotyping in ESL/EFL textbooks. The literature is abounding with content analyses rather than those incorporating systematic linguistic or visual analysis.
However, in recent years, some recent studies used transitivity system of the systemic functional grammar by Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) to explore the construction of gender in English learning materials (e. 2 Damayanti, 2010; Emilia et al. Meanwhile, some researchers applied semiological analysis by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) to explore how males and females are represented in other teaching materials (e. Adel & Enayat, 2016; Damayanti, 2010).
However, these studies adopted a systemic analysis of either the texts or the images. They also restricted the data source to the reading texts in the textbooks or focused on data related to specific topics. Besides that, these studies largely relied on quantitative method as the tool for analysis and could therefore fail to gain insights into how males and females are portrayed. Taken together, there has been a lack of studies that systematically analyze both written texts as well as images, and equally use quantitative and qualitative methods as the tool of analysis.
As a result, this research attempts to fill this methodological gap. The textbooks under investigation are Solutions Elementary Student’s Book (2nd and 3rd editions). These textbooks were chosen for three main reasons. First, the textbook Solutions elementary (2nd edition) has been used as the coursebook for non-specialized students at Quy Nhon University; therefore, the findings of this study can provide useful pedagogical implications for the lecturers and learners.
Second, these books are part of the Solutions series, which are published by Oxford University Press, one of the world’s largest publishing companies (Milliot, 2018). This means that they have the potential to reach a global readership, thus leaving its impact on a wider scale than just within Quy Nhon University campus. The final reason is consolidated through a series of events. At the beginning of the 21st century, many declarations of global significance, such as EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/4 (UNESCO 2003), officially state the global aim of eliminating gender inequality in all levels of education by 2015.
However, taking stock of progress towards gender equality between 3 2000 and 2015, the world remains far from achieving gender equality in education, and gender bias remains pervasive in textbooks (UNESCO, 2015). This failure pushed the objective of eliminating all forms of discrimination against women and girls in education by 2030 to the top of the UNESCO Agenda for Sustainable Development. Taken together, it seems reasonable to find out whether any changes were made by the textbook authors after the turning-point year of 2015. This was why both the 2nd edition (2013) and 3rd edition (2018) were subjected to analysis.
AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1. Aims This research seeks to uncover how males and females are represented in Solution Elementary Student’s Books 2nd and 3rd editions. The results are expected to shed some light on whether any gender stereotyping permeates within the books, which could subsequently provide possible pedagogical guidelines for teachers and students alike. Objectives To achieve the stated aims, the study focuses on the following objectives: 1.
To investigate the linguistic-gendered clauses in the written texts in respect of transitivity processes, the roles of males and females as participants in the processes, the frequency of occurrence of these roles, how male and female participants are constructed through other participants in the processes. To investigate the images in terms of their representational meaning, the roles of males and females as participants in the images, and how the images and the written texts interact to represent the male and female participants.