Comparative Analysis of Media Discourse on Sex Education in China and the UK —— A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

• In Event: Highlighted session: Inclusion, representation, and education

Proposal

I. Introduction
Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) has become a contentious issue in both developed and developing countries (Guttmacher Institute, 2018). The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for the mobilization of political commitment to leave no one behind, and for the actualization of quality education, human rights and gender equality . This breeds opportunities to bring CSE worldwide. However, despite compelling evidence for the benefits of CSE, few youths are provided with the preparation which empowers them to make informed decisions regarding sexuality and healthy relationships (UNESCO, 2018).

National policies embrace different orientations towards CSE. In China and the UK, CSE is being debated with mounting sense of urgency. The outbreak of sexually transmitted infections in China has steered CSE towards risks and disease (Shangguan et al., 2012; Tu et al., 2008). The UK, as a forerunner to have launched Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) nation-wide, has a more liberal environment for sex education discourses which go beyond disease prevention (Li, 2017; Zhu & Lu., 2014).

News discourse affords the public critical lens to re-evaluate reality, where views are being circulated and reproduced (van Dijk, 2006; Fairclough, 1992). Examining the media representation of CSE would be illuminating for policymakers and educators devising and delivering related interventions.

Related studies in international context are not abundant. Kingori et al. (2004)’s study on newspaper coverage in England highlighted distinctions across newspaper type, spokesperson and region, and concluded that SRE was more positively portrayed. Political partisanship was identified in Simey and Wellings’ study in 2008, in which conservative newspapers were found to be less favorable to SRE. Empirical studies addressing this issue in China are lacking depth. Liu (2017) investigated the sex education discourse on Weibo and concluded that youth’s voices were underrepresented, as only 11.7% of sex education discussions cited youths as speech agents. By comparing two types of newspapers, Yu (2014) found that reportage on sex education were often permeated with empty slogans. These two pieces of research drew from communication theory, which could only reveal a shallow surface of the thematic patterns.

This study embraces a corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore the sex education news discourse in China and the UK from 2013 to 2018, aiming to address the following questions:
(1) What are the similarities or differences between the news discourse around sex education in China and the UK with regard to discursive patterns and sentiment orientations?
(2) How do these reflect the socio-cultural contexts of China and the UK?

II. Originality
This study is innovative in that it is so far the first attempt to explore the comparative media portrayal of sex education under corpus-based CDA framework. It aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions on sex education at three levels: (1) to deepen our understanding of distinctive patterns of news language across socio-cultural contexts, (2) to demonstrate the usefulness of a new approach to unveiling such patterns, which integrates corpus linguistics and CDA, and (3) to provide insights into the sex education campaign and evolving socio-cultural landscapes.

III. Methodology
Based on a corpus-driven CDA approach, this study attempts to conduct a qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis of the English news reports concerning sex education published in major newspapers from China and the UK. The present study is exploratory in nature. Relevant news articles were first retrieved from LexisNexis database to build the corpora (Jan 01, 2013-Mar 31, 2018). Newspapers were chosen primarily based on their circulation and availability on LexisNexis. By use of word clouds, it first outlined and compared the general patterns of sex education news discourses from the two countries. Then, keywords and themes were identified through the corpus tool AntConc. This was followed by a collocation analysis and a sentiment analysis of some of the selected themes.

IV. Findings
This study was exploratory in nature. The word clouds communicated the overall pictures provided initial information about the discursive representations of sex education. The salience of the term sex education in both corpora, the salience of disease-related terms in CSEC, and the salience of porn-related and politics-related terms in UKSEC were visually depicted, which guided further analyses.

The two filtered keyword lists, after being categorized into thematic groups, encapsulated the thematic focuses of each news corpus (See Appendix). The keyness breakdowns also helped identify four themes which were explored in detail: disease-related theme, minority-related theme, politics-related theme, and internet-related theme.

Firstly, a high proportion of Chinese news was related with public health concerns such as AIDS/HIV prevention and unwanted pregnancies. The collocation and sentiment analyses reveal that sex education and HIV/AIDS prevention were discursively constructed with pronounced urgency. Notions such as masturbation, premarital sex, and sex intercourse have been pathologized. By contrast, UK news corpus had fewer disease-related discussions, but nonetheless used more urgent and negative languages in discursive representation.

Secondly, in terms of minority-related theme, the Chinese media attached greater attention to the proper sex education for marginalized social groups, including “left-behind” children, sexual minorities and sex workers. The UK media identified sexual minorities as marginalized groups, and delineated an even more negative portrayal, stressing the urgency of an inclusive approach to sex education. Among the negatively-toned concordances in both corpora, a disproportion between diagnostic languages and prognostic ones was discerned, reaffirming the “victimizing” of minorities.
The concordances in the unique politics-related theme in the UK corpus reflected the SRE campaigns over these recent years. Negatively-toned phrases occurring from 2013 to 2016 demonstrated clashes among duty holders and their appeals for statutory SRE. More positively-toned phrases emerge after the election of the New Government. Overall, the politics-related discussions in the UK corpus painted a negative picture.

As for the Internet-related theme in the UK corpus, porn-related topics were frequently discussed in negative tones. Concordance analysis revealed that pornographic discourse was intermeshed with feminist discourse of sexual equality, including the hypersexualization of females, revenge porn, sexting and their corruptive influence on school children.

Author

• Zhongyu Wei, Harvard Graduate School of Education