Reproduction, Resistance and Gender in Educational Discourse: The Role of Critical Discourse Analysis

Classrooms provide lessons not only in subject content but also in socially approved forms of academic discourse. Moreover, they may function to reproduce normative social values, attitudes and beliefs. This paper focuses on the reproduction of and resistance to traditional gender roles in the classroom discourse of university students. By some measures (turn and word counts), women appear to have achieved an equal access to the public floor in these academic exchanges, yet a closer examination of the content and contexts of their discourse reveals complex struggles for control of the conversational floor. Women\u27s control may be contested by task-divergent behaviors (such as derisive asides) that uphold the status quo in which men control public space, yet women may also enact divergent but essentially task-continuative behaviors that contest prevailing, restrictive norms by restructuring discourse to exercise other choices. Critical discourse analysts may play an important role in challenging the passive reproduction of repressive practices, by analyzing and promoting the liberatory discourse choices that arise from non-elites who resist the status quo in their conversation

Young Swedish students' knowledge of English grammatical morphemes

Research has shown that children who have English as a first language acquire grammatical morphemes in a predictable order. Many researchers claim that second language learners also follow a predictable pattern when learning English grammatical morphemes regardless of their linguistic background, and that the same mechanisms are responsible for both first and second language acquisition. The aim of this paper was to study Swedish students’ knowledge of English grammatical morphemes, and to compare their knowledge with that of second language learners from other countries as well as with that of first language learners. The results show that Swedish students seem to acquire morphemes in a similar way to that of second language learners in general and that they make errors similar to those made by first language learners. For example, the copula was almost fully acquired, while the third person regular and irregular constituted a problem for the students. The most notable exception was the possessive ´s, which Swedish students seem to acquire at an early stage compared to other second language learners

Constructing and enacting gender through discourse: negotiating multiple roles as female engineering students

College is an important setting in which to examine how gender roles are constructed and enacted through discourse. The multiple gender-role demands and conflicts are especially evident in the discourse of women studying at a technological university. Women who are learning to become engineers must either accommodate to or resist the gender roles and discourse of this androcentric profession. Analysis of the discourse of students in classes and in small-group discussions at a technological university provides evidence that women are caught in the tension between conflicting gender-role demands. In their academic exchanges, women display a variety of linguistic behaviours that defy easy gender stereotypes. This gender polarization arises from years of strong, dichotomous gender role socialization, starting at birth. The women, especially, engage in social interactions that demand a more complex notion of socially constructed and manipulated gender roles. Most students are aware of the ratio of women to men and the strains which that ratio places on social relationships

Toward a comprehensive theory of language and gender

The search for explanatory coherence in language and gender research has fostered a variety of research methods and analyses; this article evaluates the contributions of the Communities of Practice approach, with its focus on the constructive practices of a group - especially mutual engagement of learning a jointly negotiated practice of gender. Rather than presupposing gender differences as a starting point, CofP emphasizes the learning and mutability in gendered linguistic displays across groups; CofP theory thus naturalizes intragroup variation, not marking it as deviant. However while the CofP approach focuses much-needed attention on the social construction of gender as local and cross-culturally variable, gender research must be augmented by critical study of two other facets of gender: ideology and innateness which are critical components of a more comprehensive theory of gender for language research

The question of questions: Beyond binary thinking

This chapter raises new questions about language which challenge rather than reinforce gender polarization. Feminist scholars have pointed out that although the majority of human beings can be unambiguously classified as either female or male, there are actually more than two sexes. In the past, linguists have used the term gender to refer to grammatical word categories based on, but independent of, sex differences. There is considerable evidence that variables such as race, social class, culture, discourse function, and setting are as important as gender. Although researchers studying language and gender are generally sensitive to the power of language, the traditional questions have tended to reinforce rather than to weaken the prevailing female-male dichotomy. Individuals who fail to fit the strict female-male dichotomy are either ignored or subject to boundary policing. Both language and traditional social practice suggest that there are clear boundaries between biological females and males

Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women\u27s language and men\u27s language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_books/1005/thumbnail.jp

Rethinking language and gender research: Theory and practice

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women\u27s language and men\u27s language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies