doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.6.558
Gender Representation in Example Sentences: A Study of Chinese EFL Undergraduate Grammar Textbook
Ya Xu
,
Yi Zhang *
- School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), Shaanxi, Xi’an, China
- Manuscript received July 24, 2024
- revised August 14, 2024
- accepted August 29, 2024
- published November 25, 2024
Abstract
The study of gender representation in textbooks began in the 1970s, and a number of studies have covered the issues of gender stereotypes and gender bias in textbooks. To explore whether such phenomena exist in Chinese EFL textbooks, the present study adopted quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the example sentences in a textbook New Grammar Course with the guidance of Macaulay and Brice’s coding scheme. Regarding the gender representation in the example sentences, the study first found that male-gendered arguments outnumbered female-gendered arguments significantly. Second, this suggested that males were more represented as subjects and agents while females as objects and patients. Third, it showed that females were more likely to be referred to a kinship term like wife whereas males were likely to have more decent occupations, do more intellectual work, and perpetrate violence. This study aims to show the phenomena of gender inequality in the current textbook, and have some implications for revision work of Chinese EFL textbooks.
Keywords
- example
- gender studies
- English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
- EFL textbook
- gender representation
How to Cite
Ya Xu and Yi Zhang, "Gender Representation in Example Sentences: A Study of Chinese EFL Undergraduate Grammar Textbook," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 443-448, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.6.558
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).