Gender Portrayal in Mastering English Book Five: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Sex is a set of biological attributes while gender is a social construct influencing the perception of males and females in society.  Gender roles affect interaction and power distribution in society and are fanned in many ways, including individuals, family groups and institutions. This study examines how gender disparities are propagated through learning English at the secondary school level.  The study is descriptive, analysing language use in Mastering English, a textbook for Form 5 students. Mastering English is a course book used in Cameroon's English System of Education. The study analyses the textbook's comprehension passages, dialogues and letters, exercises and examples, and pictures. These aspects are treated for gender exclusion and inclusion, gender stereotyping, gender discrimination, order of appearance, representation in activities, and pictorial representations. The theories used as the basis of this analysis are Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Van Dijk’s Sociocognitive approach, which is a triangular interrelation between discourse, cognition and society, analysing the macrostructure, superstructure and microstructure. The findings portray a gender bias presentation in both the linguistic and pictorial representation in favour of the male gender.