Copyright by Tatiana Borisovna Segura 2008 - The University of ...

group, nine were assaulted by French men at some point during their sojourn in France
(most of them were just grabbed, one was raped). One of the participants in the study
compared female experiences abroad to those of prisoners: their freedom is situationally
constrained, and they have to avoid doing certain things (like, for example, going to the
movies late at night) because of safety concerns. Kline comments on the situation by
noting that women’s “efforts to protect themselves imposed constraints on their activities
and on their freedom to enjoy solitude” (178). Such conscious avoiding of interactions
with native speakers of the target language deprives language learners from valuable
practice and eventually results in low gains in linguistic proficiency.
The results of Kline’s research also reveal that gender is a significant factor
influencing students’ choice of reading material. Women in her research preferred
reading romance novels and women’s magazines, while men preferred newspapers and
news weeklies. Reading different types of materials allowed participants in Kline’s
research to develop distinct identities as literates; men and women formed different types
of reading communities and, eventually, different types of language learning
communities. This difference in the preferences for reading materials could be a result of
different gender socializations. Men also experienced more pressure to confine
themselves to specific types of materials; in other words, they would have liked to read
women’s magazines, but could not do so because they didn’t want to be ridiculed. As
Kline summarizes it, “women tended to use texts to establish and to maintain connections
with others; men tended to use texts to establish and to maintain their position in
conversational or interactional hierarchies” (206-07).
Unlike other studies dealing with gender in a study abroad setting, Mathews’s
research revealed no correlation between gender and students’ proficiency gains in
speaking and listening in a study abroad context in Russia. She concludes that the so-
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