Boys and Foreign Language Learning

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1 Boys and Foreign Language Learning

3 Boys and Foreign Language Learning Real Boys Don t Do Languages Jo Carr Queensland University of Technology and Anne Pauwels The University of Western Australia

4 Jo Carr and Anne Pauwels 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carr, Jo, 1943 Boys and foreign language learning : real boys don t do languages / Jo Carr, Anne Pauwels. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language and languages Study and teaching. 2. Sex differences in education. 3. Language and languages Sex differences. 4. Boys Education. I. Pauwels, Anne. II. Title. P C dc

5 For Kylie and Sasha Carr

7 Contents Preface Acknowledgements ix xiv 1 Introduction 1 Contextual frame 1 The structure of the book 3 2 Setting the Scene 5 Foreign language learning: the learning of another language 5 Foreign language learning in English language countries: a historically gendered area of study? 5 Boys and girls participating in school-based foreign language learning: a statistical overview 8 3 The Gendering of Languages Education 20 Gender and schooling debates: focus on the boys 21 Theoretical framing 25 4 Boys Talking 54 Background to the project and methodology 56 The study 57 5 Other Boys Talking 89 School A: Beaconsfield College 92 School B: Pensborough College 100 School C: St Barnaby s College 104 Summary Teachers Talking 111 Nature or nurture? Girls Talking About Boys 150 Girls talk Reading Between the Lines 164 Reconnecting with theory 165 Our research questions 168 vii

8 viii Contents 9 Changing Thinking, Transforming Action 191 Navigating new times in old style: the outer frame 191 The school curriculum and administration frame 195 The teaching and learning frame 198 The inner boys languages frame: boy-friendly pedagogy? 201 Bibliography 208 Author Index 219 Subject Index 222

9 Preface This book has been a long time in the making. The research project around which it is structured had small beginnings more than a decade ago in North Queensland, Australia; our interest in the issue of gender and foreign language study, however, goes back much further. We thought it worthwhile to briefly summarise our respective routes to this exploration of boys relationship with languages education. Jo Carr My experience of learning a language in school French began in an all-girls school in Yorkshire in the late 1950s. The question of boys and language study, therefore, wasn t one we thought about. Boys were occasionally encountered at inter-school language competitions, where they typically did less well than we did, appearing uncomfortable and embarrassed by the whole event; and there was a vague sense that brothers tended not to choose languages as much as we did; but this didn t really add up to any sense of languages being more of a female than a male project. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, gender wasn t an issue. There were no critical analyses of gendered curricula or gendered language practices; no affirmative action for girls in maths and sciences or boys in arts and languages. The one male teacher in our school taught history; and our French teacher, a wonderfully dynamic, very French (to our eyes) woman, was the single reason why many of us went on to study French at university. It was at university that gender began to appear around the edges of my consciousness; not in any theorised or critical way, more as a realisation that the majority of my fellow languages students were, like me, female. This was more a social realisation than any kind of sociological analysis. Male students studying languages were a minority group; a rather exotic one, not just because they were few in number, but because they tended to come back from the compulsory study-abroad year smoking Gauloises and wearing leather jackets. As an undergraduate, then as a postgraduate student, I accepted as normal the fact that most language students were female (although most senior academic positions were held by men). Once out in the workforce, teaching high-school French before moving into the allied trades of educational publishing and broadcasting, my ix

10 x Preface sense of the gendering of languages education became further settled into the common sense of how things are. There was a general understanding that languages are, on the whole, what girls do. They are good at them; boys are better at other things. These understandings informed what we did, as language teachers and programme developers, and were continuously reinforced by broader school-based practices. A move to Australia in the 1970s confirmed the truth of this account. Australian boys were even less interested in languages than British boys; probably, I assumed, because they were further removed from the possibility of real encounters with native speakers (in North Queensland in the 1970s the languages offered in schools were still mainly European, with Asian languages only just beginning to be introduced). I taught large cohorts of equal numbers of boys and girls for the first year of compulsory language study at high school; and some of the most enthusiastic and successful learners were boys. I was regularly dismayed when they disappeared en masse at the first post-compulsory moment. This was the beginning of a more focused interest in the boys don t do languages phenomenon. In spite of my best efforts to keep them in what I now see to be very inequitable affirmative action they continued to disappear. I dedicated most of our culture time in class to what I believed to be boy-friendly topics: stories of World War 2 French resistance fighters; military manoeuvres; the Tour de France; my own manoeuvres clearly reflecting my understanding at that stage of both gender and foreign language teaching methodology; and they were for the most part unsuccessful. There were some powerful influences in play which I had no way of counteracting or, at that stage, understanding. Several years later, after a long absence from both teaching and academic work, I reconnected with both, enrolling in postgraduate study which included language and literacy education, but also gender studies and critical, discourse-oriented studies. Like all gender studies novitiates, I experienced the inevitable road to Damascus gender realisations: seeing gender everywhere, in my own professional and personal relationships; in my children s negotiation of individual and collective identities; in workplace relations and the political world order. And the boys languages relationship came back for reconsideration. I moved from postgraduate study to teacher education, where I have worked for the last ten years, finding myself directly reconnected with language classrooms and gender issues. Over all this time, and across these different contexts, there has been little change in the profile of language learners. Language classrooms continue to be peopled mainly by girls and women. The majority of language teachers are women. Boys continue to

11 Preface xi show massive disinterest in the foreign languages option. As a pre-service language teacher educator, I scan the list of incoming enrolled students each year, hoping to see a more equal balance between male and female contenders; and every year I see the same imbalance: at best 5 10 per cent of incoming pre-service language teachers will be male. I have thought about this issue from many angles now: as a language learner, as a French teacher, as a first-language/literacy educator with an interest in language and gender, as a pre-service language teacher educator of both domestic and international students, as a parent, as an in-service consultant to teachers in the field. My thinking around the issue has shifted significantly in terms of informing frames. Critical cross-disciplinary debates around language, culture, identity and discourse have long since moved me from the how things are frame to a more critical, interrogative, socially and culturally informed position of considering the boys languages relationship as a text which sits within several constituting contexts. And so I reached a point of feeling confident in terms of theorising the boys languages relationship: recognising core elements which have sustained its shape over such a long time and through such changing external conditions; and it became time to test these theoretical understandings, to look for confirmation (or reconfiguration) from real data. It was time to go to the source, talk with boys and find out what they had to say about themselves, about foreign languages as a curriculum option, and about their experience in language classrooms. Anne Pauwels My experience in the area of languages learning and teaching is rather different from Jo s. I grew up in a country with official bilingualism where the learning of foreign languages was compulsory (at least of the first foreign language). Boys as well as girls engaged in foreign language learning in similar numbers at least up to matriculation. At university the presence of men in foreign language study was also not exceptional: there certainly were fewer men than women engaging in the study of (mainly) European languages but male students were not a rarity in the tertiary language learning environment, making up about 40 per cent of most classes. This changed quite dramatically when I moved to the Australian university environment in the early 1980s. There I taught German and class composition was almost entirely female. In fact it was unusual to have more than five males in a class of 20 students irrespective of the level (beginners, intermediate or advanced levels). Those male students who did participate were usually quite motivated and were very

12 xii Preface similar to their female counterparts in terms of linguistic/language proficiency. Furthermore my experience did not seem to be unusual, with colleagues teaching other languages at university experiencing similar enrolment patterns. Involved in language contact research, I did not analyse this gendered participation pattern further but assumed it was just an Australian thing. After some time my research on language maintenance and language shift in Australian immigrant communities brought me back in contact with gender and language. Analyses of language use patterns in several migrant communities revealed that women and men behaved differently in terms of the maintenance of the migrant language and the acquisition of English (Pauwels, 1995). In the early 1990s I also became involved in analysing the attitudes and motivations of Australian students towards the study of foreign languages known in the Australian context as either Community Languages or Languages other than English LOTE (Fernandez, Pauwels and Clyne, 1993). The findings of these projects showed again that gender was a significant factor in understanding language learning dynamics in Australia. An analysis of the gender dimension had to wait though until I completed other work which focused on gender and language reform (Pauwels, 1998). A conversation with Jo, during a Modern Language Teachers congress in Canberra where she had presented findings from her research into the boys languages relationship in North Queensland triggered our collaboration on this larger project. The research project As indicated, the project began on a small scale, as a pilot study, funded by a regional university. About 30 boys in one of the largest state high schools in the region were interviewed, some continuing with languages, most having dropped out; and the findings were overwhelmingly discouraging (Carr and Frankom, 1997). From this small sample, the message was loud and clear: languages are not an option taken seriously by the majority of boys. They are seen as irrelevant, uninteresting, and for many boys discouragingly difficult. More than anything else, however, they are too closely associated in boys minds with girls. When the findings of this pilot study were presented at a national conference in Canberra in 2001, a surprising number of teachers came forward with accounts of their own experience working with boys, requests for support, advice, information, some encouraging success stories, but many more accounts of concern and frustration. Invitations were issued to address professional associations and national conferences, in

13 Preface xiii New Zealand as well as in Australia; this appeared to be the sleeping dog issue of languages education; and it seemed time to embark on a more substantial exploration of the boys languages relationship. It was at that point that Anne Pauwels expressed interest in being involved in a larger project to collect a substantial corpus of data and engage in more theoretically detailed analysis. Her contribution is presented in Chapter 2, where she provides the broader framing of the more locally-situated boys languages relationship explored in the book, placing it both in historical and cross-communities context. She has also provided helpful feedback at various stages of the project, especially at the final stages, contributing her knowledge and expertise in terms of thinking about the global dimension of the issues and contributing occasional additional data from research which she carried out some years ago.

14 Acknowledgements We wish to thank the schools who allowed us access to their students, the teachers who contributed significantly both to the impetus and the implementation of this project, and, most of all, the students who talked with us. Their good will, thoughtfulness, humour and energy made this an enjoyable as well as productive research experience. We would also like to thank Julia Rothwell for her valuable assistance in collecting and collating enrolment data on language learning around the English-speaking world; and the educational departments who assisted her in this work: the Department of Education and Skills, United Kingdom; the Data Management Unit, New Zealand Ministry of Education; the Scottish Qualifications Authority; the Northern Territory (Australia) Department of Employment, Education and Training; the New South Wales (Australia) Office of the Board of Studies; the South Australian Department of Education and Children s Services; the Victorian Department of Education and Training (Australia); the Queensland (Australia) Studies Authority; the Western Australian Department of Education and Training. Finally, we thank Mitchell Ryan, a student at Kelvin Grove State College, Brisbane, who provided the cover photo to the book: a much appreciated contribution. xiv

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