6 results on '"GENDER differences in language"'
Search Results
2. Gender and language learning.
- Author
-
Sunderland, Jane
- Subjects
GRAMMATICAL gender ,FOREIGN language education ,GENDER differences in language ,GRAMMATICAL categories ,CATEGORIZATION (Linguistics) ,POSTSTRUCTURALISM - Abstract
The article presents a discussion on the relationship between gender and language learning. Gender factors in language learning relate to the people involved in the learning/teaching process, and to the language itself. People include students and teachers as well as textbook characters. Students' gender may relate to their classroom language, their learning styles or strategies of learning, their attitudes to languages and language learning, their proficiency in the language, and to their performance on different types of assessment. As regards teachers, the distribution and nature of their teacher-student talk may be gendered, as may their perceptions. Textbooks and other teaching materials are gendered in the way they represent female and male characters. Gender in the people sense refers broadly to the socially shaped characteristics of women and men, boys and girls. However, poststructuralist thinking sees gender identities and relations as being shaped by language use. Accordingly, gender identities and relations of language learners can be seen as being at least as much an effect of classroom processes as those processes are an effect of gender.
- Published
- 2000
3. Toward a Feminist Theory of Gender and Communication.
- Subjects
GENDER differences in language ,METHODOLOGY ,GENDER ,FEMINISM ,SOCIAL structure ,FEMINIST theory - Abstract
The article focuses on the methodology for gender and language research. It is important not to hierarchize methods. Despite its limitations, quantitative experimental research has important advantages for feminist inquiry. On the study of relationships, whether one's method of choice is the experiment or discourse analysis, it is crucial to study women in interaction and to analyze speech as socially situated. Among feminist theorists, women of color have led the way in recognizing that systems of oppression are linked, that all are based upon hierarchy and dominance and all are supported by similar social structures. Feminists are particularly likely to hold a social constructionist view of reality. They understand that gender-differentiated behavior is constructed in interaction and they do not see it as existing naturally. Feminist activists hold apparently contradictory beliefs that social structural factors are beyond the individual's control and also that individuals can change social systems. Those who want to understand how the gender system is recreated and maintained are wise to focus on language use.
- Published
- 1995
4. The Search for a Women's Language.
- Subjects
WOMEN -- Language ,GENDER differences in language ,FEMINISM ,GENDER expression ,SOCIALIZATION - Abstract
The article presents a research on the definitive features of women's speech. With linguist Robin Lakoff's call for attention to sex as a variable, the women's movement arrived in linguistic research. Her claim that women characteristically use a speech style that is hesitant, ingratiating and weak was based on her intuitions as a speaker rather than on more systematic observation. Lakoff was interested primarily in the characteristics, not the origins of women's speech. When she attended to origins, she relied on a social learning model where women speak a hesitant, powerless, and deferential language because they have been socialized from early childhood to do so. Blaming early socialization serves the interests of socially dominant groups. It provides the comforting assurance that change will necessarily be slow as each generation gradually and laboriously revises socialization practices. The 1970s search for sex differences in language use was a resurgence of an old set of questions, though situated now in a very different social context.
- Published
- 1995
5. Talking across the Gender Gap.
- Subjects
GENDER differences in language ,GENDER studies ,SEX differences (Biology) ,FEMINISM ,SOCIAL science research ,SOCIAL structure - Abstract
The article focuses on the issue whether women and men speak differently and discusses the related research. Research on women's language framed language as a set of static linguistic features to be counted. Feminist objections to sex difference research originated in efforts to rid it of sex bias. Incorporating the diversity of women into gender and language research is a complex process. Feminist scholars realized early on that simply adding women to old male-centered paradigms is not sufficient. Simply adding a sample of African-American women or lesbians, without reconceptualizing the questions and methods of research, is not sufficient to create a feminist social science for all women. The sex difference approach is an essentialist approach. Essentialism conceptualizes gender as a set of properties residing in one's personality, set, or traits. The distinction between the terms sex and gender, developed early in the contemporary wave of feminist research, was a significant attempt to separate the biological sex from the social gender and thus to open ways to critique the social.
- Published
- 1995
6. Gender and language.
- Author
-
Sunderland, Jane
- Subjects
GRAMMATICAL gender ,FOREIGN language education ,GENDER differences in language ,GRAMMATICAL categories ,CATEGORIZATION (Linguistics) ,SEMANTICS - Abstract
The article presents a discussion on the relationship between gender and language. The term gender in the phrase "gender and language" refers to gender as a characteristic of language as an abstract system, that is, it is used here to refer to a grammatical category. Traditionally, languages have been described as having either natural or grammatical gender. Natural gender is semantic. A language with natural gender requires that the gender of an animate noun or pronoun corresponds to the biological sex of the person or animal to which that noun refers. Grammatical gender, in contrast, is formal. In languages with grammatical gender, all nouns, inanimate ones as well as those referring to humans and animals, have a gender. Whether a noun referring to an inanimate object is masculine, feminine or neuter is unlikely to be evident from the noun itself. Gender in the English language has thus undergone change in terms of alternatives to genetic masculine forms.
- Published
- 2000
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