Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Roles in the SEPH Oxford English

Abstract

With the rise of gender equality awareness, gender stereotypes in textbooks have been widely concerned. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the gender role portrayals in the Oxford English published by Shanghai Educational Publishing House. To achieve this objective, a quantitative content analysis and a case study of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) are employed, with two frameworks proposed by Halliday and Kress & Van. The result of this paper suggests that there is an imbalance between male roles and female roles. Theoretically, this paper contributes to enriching the research of gender and textbooks from the perspective of MCDA. Practical implications are to promote the complications of textbooks and thus provide better materials for teachers and students to raise their gender conscious.