ABSTRACT
The attempt to combat gender inequality in textbooks has recently
attracted a lot of researchers’ concern. However, it is worth noticing that
research to date has tended to focus on gender bias in textbooks represented
through linguistic rather than other non-linguistic features such as visual
design. Educationalists have become gradually aware of the increasing role of
visual communication in learning materials of various kinds since they
believe that pictures and photographs present meanings of their own. Among
such attempts, this research investigates gender bias through pictures in the
new English textbook set for Vietnamese primary schools, which aims to
1/ examine how different genders are represented via pictures in the new
English textbook set for Vietnamese primary schools, 2/ find out whether
gendered visual representations illustrate gender bias in this textbook set. In
so doing, qualitative and quantitative content analyses were adopted, in light
of multimodal critical discourse analysis to study images involving men
and/or women from three English textbooks. By analyzing 1,534 images, the
research showed that there was a clear females’ visibility in the workplace
and social activities. Nonetheless, there appeared hidden manifestations of
gender bias, mainly towards women in their family roles as mothers,
occupational roles, domestic tasks, contribution to the education of children,
leisure activities, color representations, and positions of females in
illustrations.
