Gender And Language Learning

For many Japanese women, the English language has never been just another school subject. For them, English is the tool of identity transformation and the means of obtaining what they passionately desire – mobility, the West and its masculinity. Language Learning, Gender and Desire explores Japanese women's passion for learning English and how they negotiate identity and desire in the terrain of racial, sexual and linguistic politics. Drawing on ethnographic data and popular media texts, the book offers new insights into the multidirectionality of desire and power in the context of second language learning.

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the study of second language learning, multilingualism and gender. An impressive array of papers situated within a feminist poststructuralist framework demonstrates how this framework allows for a deeper understanding of second language learning, a number of language contact phenomena, intercultural communication, and critical language pedagogy. The volume has wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of language and gender, sociolinguistics, SLA, anthropology, and language education.

Although Gender Studies have found their way into most domains of academic research and teaching, they are not directly in the spotlight of foreign language teaching pedagogy and research. However, teachers are confronted with gender issues in the language classroom everyday. By the use of language alone, they construct or deconstruct gender roles; with the choice of topics they shape gender identities in the classroom; and their ways of approaching pupils clearly mirrors their gender sensitivity. The book "Gender and Language Learning" aims at raising awareness towards gender issues in different areas of foreign language teaching and learning. The primary objective of the book is to spark university students', trainee teachers' and in-service teachers' analysis and reflection of gender relations in the foreign language learning and teaching section.

In this first-hand study of the relationship of gender, ethnicity and the participation of children within an English-language teaching classroom, Julé re-assesses Lacan's approach to belonging with other theoretical approaches to gender and language, making use of case-study methods. She asks key questions: Are there observable tendencies in the way that boys and girls receive and use talk in the classroom? How might such tendencies be constructed or encouraged within an ESL classroom, where gender and ethnicity intersect in particular ways?

Updated and restructured new edition of a textbook for courses in language and gender which is accessible to non-linguists.

Based on participant observation in a California English as a Second Language family literacy program, this ethnographic study examines how the complexly gendered life histories of immigrant adults shaped their participation in both the English language classroom and the education of their children, within the contemporary sociohistorical context of increasing Latin American immigration to the United States. Through outlining the connections between (gendered) identity work and language learning, this study builds theoretical and empirical justification for teachers to negotiate classroom practice with each community of learners, responding to students’ individual goals, histories, and lives outside the classroom.

This volume applies the critical pedagogical approach to the area of language learning, and in doing so, it addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture.