Gender Representation in Malaysian Mandarin Textbooks

Abstract

A number of scholars have studied gender representation in textbooks, but only a few studies focus on application of multimodal discourse analysis in exploring gender representation. The present study aims to analyze gender representation in two series of four L2 Mandarin textbooks written for Malaysian learners. The ratio of female and male characters as well as the representation of genders in visual and verbal resources are examined in this study. This study applies quantitative and qualitative method by calculating the frequency and occurrence and analyzing the representation of female and male. A multimodal discourse analysis is carried out, including linguistic and visual analysis, to figure out whether there is gender stereotype by investigating verbal and non-verbal (visual) resources of sampled textbooks. Both the ratio and the depiction of female and male characters are analyzed by using ATLAS.ti software. The findings have revealed that the ratio of female and male characters is generally unbalanced in sampled textbooks. Gender stereotypes exist dominantly in depiction of female and male characters, especially in social settings and domestic settings. The implications of this study are discussed in the context of second language teaching and learning to highlight the awareness of gender representation in L2 Mandarin textbooks.