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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 32:3 (2022) ► pp.403–425

Discoursal representation of masculine parenting in Arabic and English websites

| Jordan University of Science and Technology
| Jordan University of Science and Technology

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences and similarities between Arabic and English parents’ role in Arabic and English parenting website texts and the linguistic exponents used to address parents and signal their roles, and to find out the socio-cultural ideologies that have given rise to variations in gender roles. To this end, a corpus of 40 articles targeting gender-neutral titles and father related ones were selected equally from English and Arabic websites. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Sunderland’s (2000, 2006) framework of analysis, the data were analysed and contrasted. The English texts reflected the prevalence of ‘shared parenting’ discourse, whereas the Arabic ones revealed a ‘very traditional parenthood’ discourse. These differences can be attributed to variation in the socio-cultural practices dominant in Arab and Western societies. Such findings will hopefully provide some useful insights for family life educators and parents who resort to such websites.

Keywords: parenting discourse, gender roles, Arabic and English websites
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Method and procedure of data analysis
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Representing social actors and social actions in the English texts
      • 4.1.1Social actors in the English texts
      • 4.1.2Social actions in the English texts
    • 4.2Representation of social actors and social actions in the Arabic texts
      • 4.2.1Social actors in the Arabic texts
      • 4.2.2Representing social action in the Arabic texts
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 30 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20071.ala
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