Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB)
Books recommended by early reading programmes play a pivotal role in shaping young children’s knowledge of gender identity. The present study examines how females and males are represented in English and Mandarin fiction books from NLB’s recommended reading list for Primary 1 and 2 children. Variabl...
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Nanyang Technological University
2022
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sg-ntu-dr.10356-1599742023-03-11T20:11:47Z Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) Lee, Gladys Jia Xin Francis Bond School of Humanities Geoffrey Benjamin fcbond@ntu.edu.sg Humanities::Linguistics Books recommended by early reading programmes play a pivotal role in shaping young children’s knowledge of gender identity. The present study examines how females and males are represented in English and Mandarin fiction books from NLB’s recommended reading list for Primary 1 and 2 children. Variables such as frequency counts of female and male appearances in both textual and illustrated content, occupational roles, types of names by which the book characters were identified and the order of appearance of gendered characters were examined. The findings reveal a general pattern of female dominance in the English children’s books, and significant male dominance in the Mandarin children’s books. Similarities between the English and Mandarin books include mothers being depicted in domestic settings more frequently than fathers, and some female characters embodying both stereotypical and non-stereotypical qualities; differences include greater female representation in appearances, pronouns, identification by formal names and order of appearance for the English books, but quantitative imbalance biased towards males for the Mandarin books in these aspects and more. The study demonstrates that there needs to be a push for Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) to implement guidelines that can enable educational authorities (eg. NLB, schools) and parents to select appropriate reading materials for children. Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies 2022-07-07T00:48:19Z 2022-07-07T00:48:19Z 2022 Final Year Project (FYP) Lee, G. J. X. (2022). Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB). Final Year Project (FYP), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/159974 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/159974 en application/pdf Nanyang Technological University |
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Humanities::Linguistics Lee, Gladys Jia Xin Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
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Books recommended by early reading programmes play a pivotal role in shaping young children’s knowledge of gender identity. The present study examines how females and males are represented in English and Mandarin fiction books from NLB’s recommended reading list for Primary 1 and 2 children. Variables such as frequency counts of female and male appearances in both textual and illustrated content, occupational roles, types of names by which the book characters were identified and the order of appearance of gendered characters were examined. The findings reveal a general pattern of female dominance in the English children’s books, and significant male dominance in the Mandarin children’s books. Similarities between the English and Mandarin books include mothers being depicted in domestic settings more frequently than fathers, and some female characters embodying both stereotypical and non-stereotypical qualities; differences include greater female representation in appearances, pronouns, identification by formal names and order of appearance for the English books, but quantitative imbalance biased towards males for the Mandarin books in these aspects and more. The study demonstrates that there needs to be a push for Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) to implement guidelines that can enable educational authorities (eg. NLB, schools) and parents to select appropriate reading materials for children. |
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Francis Bond |
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Francis Bond Lee, Gladys Jia Xin |
format |
Final Year Project |
author |
Lee, Gladys Jia Xin |
author_sort |
Lee, Gladys Jia Xin |
title |
Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
title_short |
Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
title_full |
Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
title_fullStr |
Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
title_full_unstemmed |
Gender representation in English and Mandarin children's books recommended by Singapore's National Library Board (NLB) |
title_sort |
gender representation in english and mandarin children's books recommended by singapore's national library board (nlb) |
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Nanyang Technological University |
publishDate |
2022 |
url |
https://hdl.handle.net/10356/159974 |
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1761781926982582272 |