Gender Difference in Sports Advertisements and Its Teaching Implications: A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) Approach

The study investigates the gender difference in 20 sports ads selected from 63 sports ads obtained from the Internet. The present study focuses mainly on interpersonal meaning of the selected sports advertisements and the findings have been used to develop teaching materials in this area. The data analysis shows that men and women ads are different in a few areas, such as men are more likely portrayed as powerful, heroic, moving, and even religious images, while women are depicted as fashionable, sexy, charming and still images. Gender difference also exists in terms of the color, gaze, distance, angle, the size of frame, etc. Male and female images interact differently with verbiage found in the ads, for instance, metaphorical meaning is created by the interaction of text and image. In addition, the report concludes by considering the implications for teachers when using multisemiotic materials in order to scaffold students’ learning. The study also proposed that a joint effort should be made to help teachers teach multisemioitics.