Gender, Sexuality and Social Class in Second Language Education Douglas Fleming

1. Gender, Sexuality and Social Class in Second Language Education Douglas Fleming Gene Vasilopoulos Faculty of Education EDU5146 2019

2. When considering behavior, the differences between men and women are difficult to classify in terms of being biologically determinate. How much is due to nature and how much to nurture? Gender, as opposed to sex, is the way in which one sees one’s own sexual role; Needless to say, social influences have a big role to play in this important aspect of self-perception; One’s sex might very well be clear enough from birth (although many would dispute this); However, gender is learned.

3. People who do not fit into the binary division of gender are subject to pressures to conform; • Gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals or transgendered people behave sexually outside the dominant norm within society and are thus commonly subject to pressures to conform to preconceived notions of what constitutes gender; • This binary division also promotes the attitude that sexual identity and behavior should be consistent and clearly demarcated against an opposite.

4. Language as Gendered • As Beasley (2005) notes, the fact that the masculine is accorded higher value than the feminine can be demonstrated linguistically; • Feminine equivalents (“spinster”as opposed to “bachelor”, for example) are usually interpreted negatively. Feminine names often contain diminutives (“waitress”, as opposed to “waiter).

5. Gender in Language Education • Two prominent areas of research on gender in language education: • 1) Unique challenges faced by educators working in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts, where learners bring with them distinct and oftentimes conflicting gender ideologies and practices; • 2) Foreign language classrooms, where students are introduced to the ‘imaginary worlds’ of other languages whose gender ideologies and practices may appear unfamiliar or perhaps even illegitimate. • Pavlenko & Piller (2007): Language Education and Gender

6. The field has moved away from looking at patterns between “men” and “women” as collective groups, but rather: experiences that particular women have in language learning: • (i) gendered access to linguistic resources; • (ii) gendered agency in language learning; • (iii) gendered interactions in the classroom; • and (iv) gender in the foreign and second language curriculum.

7. Sexuality in the Curriculum • Paiz (2015) looked at heteronormativity in English as a Second Language (ESL) reading texts and textbooks aimed at a college-aged audience and a range of proficiency levels; • Nelson (2009) applied queer theory to expose, examine, and challenge the pervasiveness of heteronormative discourses in various educational setting that erases LGBT perspectives from the second language classroom and curricula • Moore (2016) presents a case study of an English language class organized by gender and sexuality in Japan, asking how educators can address the learning needs of this particular group: identified how the content of this class still reinforced heteronormative discourses and essentialized gay identities, often excluding the voices of learners whose queer identities did not adhere to mainstream representations.

8. Social Class and Language Education • Great effort has been made to deny the very existence of social class, especially in North America (Teeple, 2000); • We are used to equating class primarily with wealth and secondarily with access to educational resources; • Given how social stratification is represented ideologically, we are also using to viewing class as being relatively fluid and based on merit; • However, it is important to note class is as socially constructed as race and gender; • Proof of this is in how societies have classified social stratification in various ways.

9. The supposed basis of social class is not biological, but socio-economic; • As opposed to race and gender, the outward appearance of class is generally more easily discarded. In other words, it is easier to hide one’s class origins as opposed those pertaining to one’s race or gender; • One can also change class membership in ways that are not dependent on physical attributes.

10. The Indian caste system in its traditional formulation, for example, is quite rigid in terms of social mobility; • Native social hierarchies were quite variable; • Traditional Confucius Chinese social stratification; • Within modern European notions of class, there are important variations: • Pre-revolutionary France was marked by the three estates (church; aristocracy/ military; and everyone else); • The traditional British system divided society into the aristocracy and the commons. • It could be argued that communist countries have divided classes according to party membership.

11. Financial capital passed down from family members perpetuates class divisions in obvious ways. However, other factors also play a hand. • Cultural capital (Bourdieu,1977) is a set of non-materialist resources related to family background, social status (as opposed to economic class) and education that is passed down from generation to generation. • Different values are found within hierarchical forms of cultural capital that can be variously transformed into the more tangible material forms of capital, such as money and power.

12. Social Class in Language Education • In post-colonial contexts, English perpetuates class division: English and vernacular-medium teachers in Gujarat [are] acutely aware of the extent to which English teaching is... a class-based endeavor” despite being “seen to ostensibly have the power of splintering class-based enclaves” (Ramanathan & Morgan p. 155); • In EFL contexts (e.g. China, Korea, Japan, Mexico) English has become a critical means of gaining and maintaining class distinctions (Gao, 2014; López-Gopar & Sughrua, 2014; Shin, 2014); • Kanno’s (2008) research on imagined communities showed that in five very different schools in Japan attended by students of different social classes, students were offered unequal access to studying elite languages, such as English, and devaluing the language skills of children from poorer immigrant backgrounds.

13. Neoliberalism and Globalization • Recent scholarship has explored connections between neoliberalism and applied linguistics/ELT (e.g., Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012; Chun, 2013; Clarke & Morgan, 2011); • “Neoliberalism, with its principles of unregulated markets, privatization, corporatization, and the valorizing of individual responsibility over government’s obligation to the public good is relevant here because it is complicit in reproducing, reinforcing, and exacerbating social class status inequalities through corporate and state influences on education” (Vandrick, 2014, p. 88); • For example, students who have high social class status are more likely than others to understand the educational and work world systems and to have access to resources for success (Darvin & Norton, 2014)

14. Social Class in North American ESL Classrooms • Social class privilege can and often does lessen the sometimes negative effects of students being labeled and perceived as ESL students (Vandrick, 2009, 2010; Darvin & Norton, 2014); • Students are from a high social class, they may be much less affected by that condescension, prejudice, or discrimination. They may in fact feel superior to those others because of their social status (Vandrick, 1995, 2011).

15. Questions to consider: • Is social class “real” in 2019? • Do you believe that the distinction between sex and gender is useful? • How should a teacher orientate him/herself towards LBBTQ2 issues in the classroom? • Do you believe that class effects language and language learning? • What consequences does the notion of class have in the language learning