Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Gender Identities in Language Education 383
language education, it is also equally the case that societal expectations
and beliefs about men and women circulate in the form of gender discourses,
or ways of being ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the world that are largely
learned unconsciously through socialization processes. Of course, these
discourses are the basis of social structures such as patriarchy, which in
turn acts as a structural constraint on women’s lives and women’s access
to learning opportunities, as discussed above. However, it is important to
highlight that language learning is itself shaped by these discourses, and
that both men and women are affected by them. Moreover, as recent explorations
of learners’ identities show us, it is often the case that language
learning becomes a site for challenging and transforming common-sense
discourses of gender.
In the following section, I explore how learners experience different
gender identities in their L2. Whether learners develop L2 identities has
many implications, not only for their success in language learning, but
also for their desire to affi liate with target language communities. Learners
may fi nd gender identities in the L2 context appealing, and hence their
affi liation with these gendered ways of being may afford learners relative
ease in learning and using their L2. Alternatively, learners’ L1 gendered
identities may remain the most strongly valued, potentially leading learners
to resist cross-cultural adaptation of any kind.
Discursive assimilation to a new gendered identity
Much research on S/FL gender identities has explored how language
learners respond to the new set of subject positions, or identity options,
they encounter in their L2. Pavlenko (2001: 133) describes this experience
as ‘discursive assimilation, (re)positioning, and self-translation’ in order
to highlight the reinterpretation of the self in a new context. Pavlenko’s
(1998, 2001, 2005; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000) research has eloquently demonstrated
how L2 learners in second language contexts discursively reposition
themselves in their new environments amidst discourses of
gender. Through analyzing language learners’ autobiographies, Pavlenko
(2001) showed that female immigrants often found the new gendered subject
positions more favorable than in their home cultures. Former German
citizen Ute Margaret Saine’s perspective provides an illustration of this
‘self-translation’:
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of my German girlfriends from this
and later schools emigrated, like myself, to Italy, England, Brazil,
France, and of course, the United States. In order to escape repression,
particularly of gender. (Pavlenko, 2001: 146)
Pavlenko (2001) found that the women also experienced ambivalences
and tensions because of shifting or multiple gender identities, which often