Gender Role of Characters in the Illustrations of Local and Introduced Edition Textbooks of College Portuguese Teaching in China

Abstract

As an important resource and tool for college Portuguese teaching and learning, textbooks contain rich cultural concepts to a certain extent, among which gender culture is also deeply embedded in the textbooks and influences Portuguese students' perceptions of gender roles. This paper presents an empirical study that is based on a comparative analysis using the illustrated characters of four current college Portuguese textbooks, both local and introduced edition as the object of analysis to investigate the gender roles in these textbooks. By building a research framework that covers six dimensions of analysis: a) the number of male illustrations, female illustrations, and male and female illustrations; b) the number of male and female characters in the illustrations; c) the emotions of the male and female characters in the illustrations; d) the occupations of the male and female characters in the illustrations; e) the activity scenes of the male and female characters in the illustrations; f) the specific activities of male and female characters in the illustrations, we found that there is an imbalance of gender roles in the four introduced edition and local Portuguese textbooks, the findings suggest that the construction of gender culture in future Portuguese textbooks should pay attention to give balanced treatment to male and female characters and break down the gender stereotypes not only in the linguistic term but also visual and pictorial.