New understandings of gender and
language classroom research: texts,
teacher talk and student talk
Jane Sunderland Lancaster University
While gender has been an ongoing if sometimes peripheral area of
interest for researchers and practitioners in language education,
conceptualizations of gender itself have developed apace. This means
that, unfortunately, gender is at times viewed in an outdated way in
language education, resulting in oversimplification and unproductive
generalizations. In particular, women and girls are sometimes
simplistically represented as victims of gender bias in language
textbooks, and of male dominance in the classroom. This picture is far
from being the full one, does little, I would argue, to help female
students, and may mislead teachers. In this paper I present a rather
more complex picture. I illustrate some subtleties and complexities of
gender in language education, and suggest some implications of
research for educational practice. I also demonstrate alternatives for
research into gender and language classrooms, showing both how the
more familiar approaches can be fruitfully developed and how
researchers can go beyond them. It is important that both researchers
working in the area of gender and language education, and teachers in
their practice, should be able to engage with considerations of agency,
individuality and diversity, while not losing sight of the still-important
notions of disadvantage and of gender itself.
I Introduction
The 1990s witnessed radical changes in understandings of gender
(in the social, not grammatical sense). Maggie Humm’s definition
of gender in a 1989 publication as ‘a culturally-shaped group of
attributes and behaviours given to the female or the male’ may
have been useful once, but ten years later sounds crude,
© Arnold 2000 1362–1688(00)LR064.OA
Address for correspondence: Jane Sunderland, Department of Linguistics and Modern
English Language, Bowland College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT.
Language Teaching Research 4,2 (2000); pp. 149–173

deterministic and misleading. In particular, Humm’s idea of
attributes and behaviours being ‘given’ raises questions of ‘by what
or whom?’, ‘given once and for all?’ and of how ‘the female’ and
‘the male’ recipients accepted these attributes and behaviours:
passively? even graciously?
Understandings of gender are now more sophisticated, focusing
variously on gender identity, a sense of oneself as ‘masculine’ or
‘feminine’, and as performance (Butler, 1990) – but, crucially, do
not see gender as determined. It is therefore necessary to see
gender in language education in new, non-deterministic ways too.
However, conference papers on gender and education can still be
heard which, though well-intentioned, represent women and girls
as passive victims, and do not allow for the flux, agency, diversity
and individuality which, I suggest, are part of any classroom.
Drawing on both new understandings of gender, and refinements
of familiar ways of looking at gender in classrooms, this paper aims
to raise teachers’ awareness of the complexities and subtleties of
gender in language education, and to suggest implications for
practice and avenues of classroom research. It also aims to
illustrate how research on gender and language teaching can avoid
the pitfalls of representing teachers as predictable, willing,
unquestioning textbook users, and of female learners as passive
victims, and can engage with the notions of flux, agency, diversity
and individuality.
Some years ago I wrote: ‘The effects of gender roles, relations
and identities are everywhere. Ironically, because of this, in much
writing and thinking on English language teaching, gender appears
nowhere’ (Sunderland, 1994: 211). The claim was that,
paradoxically, because gender tends may seem normal and natural,
it often appears not to exist at all. At the start of the new
millennium we are perhaps less blind to the fact that much social
life, including our educational life, is gendered in some way, but
the claim still holds. Phenomena as diverse as literacy practices
(Millard, 1997), language tests (Sunderland, 1995a), performance
on those tests (Hellekant, 1994), self-esteem (Licht and Dweck,
1987), and learning styles and strategies (Oxford, 1994) have all
been shown to be gendered – in the sense that male and female
students tend to be represented, to behave or to feel differently.
(The word tend needs to be stressed.) However, it is now
150 New understandings