A Case Study on the Role Models in Chinese Senior High School English Textbooks—The Case of the Textbooks Published by BNUP in 2019

Abstract

Moral education has always been an important mission in Chinese education. English textbooks, as one of the vital elements in English teaching, are the main vehicle for transmitting English disciplinary knowledge, and the essential medium for teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. In fact, the values are often not directly presented in textbooks but are “hidden” in vehicles such as figures and storylines constructed by complex multimodal symbols (Feng, 2015). Therefore, it is essential to explore the images of figures and their values in Chinese English textbooks. This study takes one version of Chinese senior high school English textbooks published by BNUP in 2019 as the research objects. Based on the data collection and thorough analysis, the results show that Chinese senior high school English textbooks published by BNUP emphasize the moral education of students, and the selection of role models is relatively reasonable. Nevertheless, several shortcomings still exist, such as the unbalanced selection of role models in terms of gender and age.