Gender consciousness and its construction in Chinese education: English language textbook analysis in primary schools

Abstract

Since the significant improvement of women’s social status after the industrial revolution, gender equality has been a hot topic in the field of education. Gender consciousness, as the essential part of gender equality, has been taken increasing consideration in recent education studies. Textbooks, as knowledge carriers, are usually concerned as research objects. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conducted two main projects to explore gender consciousness in children’s textbooks in different countries, and made conclusions that gender consciousness issues, existed in textbooks, were important factors that prevent gender equality in education. Therefore, this dissertation aims at revealing gender consciousness issues in English Language textbooks published by People’s Education Press in 2012 and 2013, in primary education, and finding the factors that construct these issues. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) would be adopted as the dominant method to illustrate the construction of gender consciousness and its influencing factors. Based on CDA framework, gender representations and gender roles, as two dominant parts of gender consciousness, would be explored by using Halliday’s transitivity method firstly. Then document analysis would be adopted to explain the process of gender consciousness construction and its causes.

The dissertation contains three main findings. Firstly, in terms of gender consciousness, males played dominant and comprehensive roles in both Process and Circumstances, while females were underrepresented in English Language textbooks, published by People’s Education Press in 2012 and 2013. Furthermore, male and females’ gender roles in textbooks still contained traditional masculinity and femininity. Secondly, the process of gender consciousness construction was that the patriarchy ideology passed traditional masculinity and femininity down to English Language textbooks through the Ministry of Education, which is the mediation of the official authority that included hegemonic power. Thirdly, reasons for the existence of gender consciousness issues were patriarchy ideology, hegemonic power and Ministry of Education.