Gender-Specific Discourse Teacher Behavior In EFL Classroom

Language and gender has been a popular area for research from the beginning of human history. However, systematic and scientific study of language and gender did not occur until Lakoff's groundbreaking work entitled Language and Woman's Place in 1975. After more than three decades of development, the research in gender and language has become an interdisciplinary and multicultural study. And from the early 1990s, gender and language studies expanded into the pedagogical area mainly in the West and have since become one important variable in the classroom studies, especially in the EFL classroom. Quantitative and qualitative studies have been conducted to address the different gender issues in EFL classroom, some of which have devoted to research into teachers' differentiated treatment of boys and girls and to study the impact of this differential treatment on boy and girl students' foreign language acquisition.However, similar research is still very rare (if there is any) in China. Therefore, this research aims to collect qualitative data on teachers' specific gender-differentiated behaviors in China through classroom observation and transcription. To understand the factors causing this tendency, a questionnaire is also designed to find out teachers' perception of the relevant gender issues in the EFL classroom and of their own gender-differentiated treatment of boys and girls. The following 3 questions are to be explored in the research.(1) In what way discoursely do teachers give boys or girls more attention, more opportunities to participate in the English class?(2) What role do teachers' gender ideology and gender-specific practice play instudents' language learning?(3) Girls have better command of English because they are better bestowed thanboys or because they are expected to, as they learned from entourages that girls are more gifted and more beneficial in learning a foreign tongue? (To what extent is girls' English efficiency natural or nurtured?)Four steps of the questionnaire and the audiotaping and transcription were designed in the research, with close consultation of a great number of instruments, quantitative data (questionnaire), classroom observation(audiotape, transcription) and other literacy references.After the data description and interpretative analysis of the outcomes acquired in the questionnaire and the transcript, findings in the following several aspects are obtained.As the results of the transcribed class and the questionnaire show, teachers do differ in their treatment of boys and girls at the discourse level in the EFL classroom in terms of turn allocation, interaction length and interaction pattern, and tolerance of unruly behaviorsThough teachers distribute more or less the same amount of speaker turns to boys and girls, boys eventually get more speaker turns as they often self-select or disrupt and their turns enacted this way are often acknowledged by the teacher. On the contrast, girls rarely self-select or disrupt, though they sometimes raise their hand to bid.Concerning interaction length and pattern, teachers interact with boys longer than with girls in speaker turns, with more varied interactional pattern. There are more moves in T-B exchange than in T-G interaction. Teachers help boys to expand more and also help them to adjust their contribution in either form or content, thus facilitate greatly in their language acquisition as such meaning negotiation help boys to receive more meaningful input and produce more comprehensible output.Chinese teachers are more lenient with the girls than with the boys. They are more likely to criticize boys than girls when a boy and a girl are violating the classroom regulation. In other word, boys receive more negative attention in EFL classroom in China, which results in the more total attention on boys than on girls.As shown from the above findings, reasons for girls' foreign language superiority are more cultural-societal than biological. Teacher and social expectations lead to boys' and girls' different perception of their relationship with foreign language learning.The thesis also finds that teachers' gender stereotype, their perception of the foreign language learning and gender, and their underawarness of the gender issue in the classroom and their own gender-specific teaching practices all affect their differentiated treatment of boys and girls in the EFL classroom, which in turn influence boys' and girls' language learning experience. At last, the author urges that gender studies should be included into normal education and teacher-training programs. It is believed that teachers are reliable agent for change in EFL classroom, if equipped with proper gender equity training. Attempts should be made on the part of the Education Department, normal universities, research centers and teachers to tackle this problem as to offer both boys and girls an optimal foreign language learning experience.