Research projects at school level: Men and women’s representations in TV advertisements in Vietnam - A multimodal critical discourse analysis

This study investigates men and women’s representations in TV advertisements in Vietnam from a multimodal critical discourse analysis perspective. The data comprise of almost one hundred TV advertisements aired on principle TV channels in Vietnam such as VTV and HTV. The framework in use is Fairclough’s (2001), in which part of Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (1996) is incorporated for a multimodal discourse analysis of the advertisements. The main findings of the research include gender roles differentiation and gender stereotypes which continue to disadvantage women and perpetuate gender inequality. Embedding the findings into the sociopolitical context, the study argues that such representations reinforce traditional biased assumptions about men and women despite a number of political efforts in terms of national policies to advance gender equality in Vietnam.