Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Discourse Analysis and its Discontents 27When touching upon conversational analysis in the classroom in thelast chapter, I mentioned the recent work of Julé (2004). Her work withgirls is particularly timely, given recent tendencies to swing theeducational focus from girls to boys. For quite a long time, the literaturewas full of studies describing ways in which the presence of boys in theclassroom was a hindrance to girls’ education; much of it demonstrated,unsurprisingly, that patterns of male-female interaction outside theschool gates were replicated within them. Now, however, interest inthe education of boys seems to be growing: a recent popular treatmentwas titled The War Against Boys (Sommers, 2000). Some have argued thatboys do not do well in a ‘feminine’ school environment, others feel that amore complicated male ‘disengagement’ with education is at work, whilestill others think that it is all something of a non-issue. There remains,however, considerable agreement that, whatever else may be the case,boys still tend to dominate in verbal interaction. Julé builds uponprevious research, noting that male dominance is something with whichteachers’ behavior correlates, even though they may feel that they ‘treatthem all the same’ (Corson, 1993: 144). Generally speaking, boys continueto ‘receive a disproportionate share of teachers’ time and attention’(Stanworth, 1981: 18), and girls may find themselves in a double bind.Spender (1980), for instance, has noted that the approval of girls’behavior by teachers (and others, of course) may depend preciselyupon the very verbal restraint that allows the more forceful boys tomaintain their dominant position. These sorts of gender-variant findingsare quite general, cutting across class and ethnic lines. 3Julé’s work illustrates these matters. Her analyses reveal that teacherstypically dominate the ‘linguistic space’ in the classroom to an overwhelmingdegree and, of the small portion available to the pupils, theratio of girls’ to boys’ verbal contributions is on the order of 1:10. Thereare, of course, limitations in any investigation, but Julé’s findings withyoung Punjabi Sikh children in Canada mirror a great many others; hers,indeed, have a particular interest because they involve the joint influenceof gender and ethnicity (a combination of influences that Corson [2001]explicitly points to as relatively neglected in the literature). While it istrue that Punjabi Sikh culture is more open to gender equality than aresome neighboring societies, the author notes that ‘equity is notnecessarily the lived experience’ (p. 69). The results of Julé’s small-scalestudy may thus highlight more clearly the silencing of girls at school,with implications for other cultural variants (or heterogeneities) in theclassroom, or, indeed with subcultural variants, as, for instance, withpopulations whose maternal dialects are nonstandard.