Gendered choices, GAL 2010

G&L (print) issn 1747–6321G&L (online) issn 1747–633X Gender

and Language

L O N D O N

doi : 10.1558/genl.v3i2.181 G&L vol 3.2 2009 181–208 ©2010, equinox publishing

Article

Gendered choices:Codeswitching and collaboration in a bilingual

classroom 1

Janet M. Fuller

Abstract

In this study, an interaction in a Spanish-English bilingual classroom in the United States involving four fourth graders, two boys and two girls, is analyzed in terms of gender identity construction. Language use on two linguistic levels – that of language choice (Spanish or English) and that of communicative practice (collaboration) – is shown to contribute to the construction of gender identity. This research emphasizes the intertwining of these two levels in the linguistic construction of identity, as well as the interconnectedness of gender with other aspects of social identity, in this case ethnicity/nationality and classroom roles. Further, the study shows how social mean-ings of linguistic behavior are developed within communities of practice, and make use of both societal and locally constructed associations of social behavior.

keywords: gender identity, codeswitching, collaboration, bilingualism, classroom research

Affiliation

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA.

email: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

182 Gender and Language

Introduction

Current perspectives on language and identity embrace the idea that social identity is something which is constructed, rather than a static entity linked to social variables such as sex, social class, ethnicity, age, etc. (e.g., Bucholtz 1999; Eckert 2000; Lo 1999; Mendoza-Denton 2002; Schilling-Estes 2004). Kroskrity (2000) provides a succinct discussion of the concept of identity in linguistic anthropology. He suggests that identity may be constructed on two different levels of linguistic use. First, identity construction can occur through the use of particular languages or linguistic forms which are associ-ated with specific social groups. Second, communicative practices (such as greeting formulae or maintenance of mutual gaze) can index membership in particular social groups.

In this study, conversational data are analyzed on both of these levels. The first level, that of the choice of a particular code or linguistic element, takes the form of a choice between English and Spanish. In the following analysis, I will show how these codes not only mark affiliation with U.S. mainstream culture or Latino/Mexican culture, but also become gendered in this cohort of children through the heavy use of English by the girls and Spanish by the boys.

On the second level, the communicative practice of collaboration is ana-lyzed as another resource the students use to ‘do’ gender. Collaboration is operationalized here as participation in conversational episodes in which one speaker supports another through repetition, continuation, or elaboration of the other’s utterance. Collaborative speech per se is not found to be associated only with male or female speakers, but certain types of collaboration (i.e., co-constructed stories and jokes) are done predominantly by boys while girls show a preference for repetition and elaboration of each other’s utterances. These gendered uses of particular linguistic patterns are not intended to be generalized to larger or other populations; rather, this analysis shows how such associations are used within a small community of practice in gender construction. This study will show how collaborative speech interacts with language choice to construct the identities of the children in these data. While gender is the primary facet of identity focused on here, gender identity is intertwined with other aspects of identity, including ethnic/national affilia-tion, ‘best friends’ alignments, and status as a good student.

Language choice and gender identity

Studies on bilingual discourse have not shown a clear pattern of gender differ-ences; although in some societies codeswitching seems to be more prevalent among women than among men, or vice versa, for many communities, no

j. fuller 183

gender differences are reported (Cheshire and Gardner-Chloros 1996). In those studies that do show gender differences in language choices or codeswitching behavior, invariably it is differences in gender roles in the specific communities which lead to different linguistic practices. For example, in the landmark study by Gal (1978), she noted that Hungarian-German bilingual women avoided using Hungarian – and relationships with men who preferred Hungarian – because of its association with peasant life and the undesirable roles for wives within that community.

Another well-known study by Swigart (1991) on language use in Dakar shows that Wolof, the traditional language, is most strongly associated with women, while Urban Wolof, a French-Wolof contact variety, is associated with men. However, her study clearly shows that despite the associations of these lan-guages, there is actually a great deal of variability in language choice by women. On the one hand, there is a network of young urban women known as the ‘disco girls’ who, like the young women in Gal’s study, are making a statement through language choice about the kind of lifestyle they want, or do not want: they speak French as a rejection of traditional roles. On the other hand, Swigart observed that many young women speak Urban Wolof, especially in interactions with their children. Female use of Urban Wolof goes unrecognized because of the societal norm of Urban Wolof being linked to masculine identities. Swigart’s work shows clearly that while associations of certain languages with being male or female may be strong, they may not reflect actual language use patterns. It also shows the common tendency of women to use language choice to display their rejection of traditional lifestyles.

Research on members of an immigrant community, second generation German speakers in Australia, shows another type of interaction between gender roles and language maintenance (Winters and Pauwels 2005). Among the people interviewed in Winters and Pauwels’ study, men professed a disinclination to speak German because they felt they did not speak it well, reflecting the norm of proficient oral performance as part of hegemonic masculinity. Women, however, sought out opportunities to speak German, so that they could improve their language skills and maintain the language, drawing on cultural norms of minority language maintenance being linked to female roles.

These studies show that gender roles in a society, particularly but not exclu-sively those which have to do with language use, influence individual language choices. However, many studies of bilingualism and identity focus on other aspects of identity, ethnic or national identity being paramount (e.g., Bailey 2001, Lo 1999, Fuller 2007, Piller 2001, Potowski 2007). All of these studies view identity as something which is constructed through language use, and acknowledge that different aspects of identity – gender, ethnicity, age, etc. – may


be intertwined. There is no one-to-one correspondence between language and a particular aspect of identity. While speaking Spanish in the U.S. may be used to construct an ethnic identity, it may also, as will be argued in this study, be used in some contexts to construct a masculine identity. Similarly, an identity category is not always constructed using the same linguistic resources; for example, a Latina identity might be constructed through English, Spanish, or codeswitching, depending on the social context and interlocutors. The current analysis approaches these difficulties by addressing the issue of what it means to be a boy or a girl in this community of practice, and then showing how specific language practices are linked to those social meanings.

Discourse practices and gender identities

Both collaborative and competitive speech patterns have been linked to gender differences in previous studies. Although this research will focus on social constructionist approaches to discourse analysis, the backdrop of the ‘differ-ence’ and ‘dominance’ models for this research must be acknowledged (see Litosseliti 2006 or Talbot 1998 for a more complete history of these approaches to the study of gender). Differences between men and women, usually arguing that women use more collaborative styles and men more competitive ones, have been noted in same-sex conversations (Coates 1996, 2003; Pilkington 1998) as well as in cross-sex conversation (DeFrancisco 1998; Fishman 1983; Maltz and Borker 1982). However, research which argues that such styles are linked to context or social status more than gender has a long history (e.g., O’Barr and Atkins 1980, Chan 1992), and more recent studies have argued that female speakers also use language to establish asymmetrical and hierarchical relationships (Goodwin 2002, Madsen 2003).

The current reigning theoretical framework which explains these often con-tradictory results focuses on language as a resource for constructing identities, including gender identities, which are not fixed but fluid, situated, and based on activities in communities of practice (Bucholtz 2000). Speakers are seen as free to reproduce traditional gender roles or to challenge them; and individuals may construct different femininities or masculinities in different contexts. Although there is no fixed mapping of ways of speaking on identity categories, and meanings of codes and conversational practices may vary over time, with context, or across speakers, certain ways of speaking may be associated in the minds of interlocutors with certain social groups. Ochs (1992) suggests that this occurs with gender groups; if male or female speakers use certain linguistic behaviors, these behavioral patterns may become associated with being male or female in that cultural context.

j. fuller 185

One pragmatic feature discussed in earlier literature is indirectness. Tannen (1993: 174) does not claim empirical support for the position that women are more indirect than men, but does suggest that a link between indirectness (in particular, indirect speech acts such as requests) and femininity exists in U.S. culture. In terms of indirectness in the workplace, a double standard is often said to exist for women, especially when they are in occupations tradition-ally dominated by men. If women are too direct, they are accused of being unfeminine (or worse), and if they are not direct, they are discounted as not being capable of competing with men (Lakoff 1990; Coates 1995; Litosseliti 2006: 137). Further support for the prevalence of this double standard can be found in recent research on the psychology of organizations which shows that women who try to negotiate for more pay are judged more negatively than men who try to negotiate (Bowles et al. 2007). This dilemma clearly illustrates the limitations of an individual’s ability to construct the identity she may want: while the speaker has the choice of how she speaks, she cannot control how her way of speaking is interpreted by others.

However, because the social meanings of discourse patterns are not fixed, they can also be challenged or usurped through some uses, such as in mocking performances of ways of speaking. For example, in Eder et al.’s study of talk among Midwestern high school students, they found that some of the girls would use mock flirtatious behavior with boys, ostensibly did so to make fun of girls who ‘really’ acted that way. Others had joking discussions about ‘ownership’ of a boy, challenging societal discourse that positions women/girls as the property of men (Eder et al. 1995: 140–146).

Finally, it is important to note that the gender identities of individuals may change situationally, resulting in changes in their use of discourse patterns. Kiesling (2001) exemplifies this in his discussion of how one member of a college fraternity shifts from using direct and confrontational speech styles in interactions with his fraternity brothers to an inexpressive and paternalistic mode of speech in the presence of a woman he had previously dated. While in both cases he was constructing a masculine identity, they were different masculinities. Speakers do not construct one gender identity, but rather a range of gender identities.

The relevance of such research findings for this analysis of collaborative speech is twofold. First, because associations between linguistic practices and social groups are produced and re-produced interactionally, the behavior of individuals in specific communities of practice has a bearing on what these associations may be in a given context. Second, collaborative practices are not categorical or static; rather, speakers will make use of them variably to do identity- and relationship-building across and within conversational events.


Language in the classroom

In addition to studies which examine the relationship between language and gender, and the role of bilingualism in gender construction, this study is informed by previous research on classroom interactions. Swann and Graddol (1988) have argued that boys, although they do not necessarily contribute more, compete more effectively for floor time, in part, because they may receive subtly preferential treatment from teachers. However, a more recent study by Davies (2003), which looks at small group interaction, shows how girls benefit from gendered differences in interactional styles. She finds that while girls are able to use on-task discussion to solidify their social relation-ships with their peers within their group, friendship discourses among the boys cannot be blended with on-task discourse, thus resulting in less produc-tive group interactions among the boys. This echoes some of the findings by Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski (2001) which show that among Latino/a grade school children, the girls would often assume a position in group work which facilitated cooperation. To do this, they often used the teacher’s suggestion that their group is like a family to coerce other group members to fulfill their roles in the collaborative project.

All of these studies indicate that children in classrooms are performing dif-ferent gender roles which transcend yet are also part of the classroom setting and the academic tasks they set out to accomplish. In this study, I will examine how the identities and goals of four students influence their use of the linguistic resources they have to construct their gender identities.

Research setting: the bilingual classroom

The bilingual program which was the setting for this research is a transitional program for children in grades K-6 in a small, rural community in southern Illinois. There is a significant Spanish-speaking population in this area, origi-nally due to the presence of migrant workers, mostly from Mexico, who came to work in the local agricultural sector. As many immigrants have obtained work outside of this seasonal employment, there is also a growing permanent Latino/a population in southern Illinois.

Illinois state law requires that any school building which serves 20 or more children of Limited English Proficiency (LEP) who share a first language must offer bilingual education. At the time of this research, 29.2% of the 377 (i.e., 110) children in the elementary school were classified as Hispanic, and 25.2% (95) were classified as LEP. Aside from the Hispanic population, there were no other children who were not English L1 speakers. Of the 70.8% of the school’s

j. fuller 187

population that was not Hispanic, 68.2% (257) were white and 2.7% (10) were Black. (Information from the 2004 Illinois School Report Card.)

I conducted research at this school during the 2003–2004 and 2004–2005 school years. I acted as a participant observer in the combined 4th/5th/6th grade classroom, frequently leading the children through lessons when they were split into groups by grade level. I spent approximately four hours in the classroom every week, two during instruction in English and two during instruction in Spanish.

Like most bilingual programs, this classroom was structured so that the children spoke English at certain times of the day (here, the morning) and for certain subjects, and Spanish at other times (here, the afternoon) and for other subjects. However, as has been discussed by Hadi-Tabassum (2002), children in a bilingual classroom may create a ‘third space’, i.e., a mode in which the use of both languages is acceptable. Research by Becker (2001) also shows that children use codeswitching in narrative re-tellings, and that use of codeswitch-ing was positively correlated to other features of enhanced narrative skill, but did not negatively correlate with language proficiency. Thus, codeswitching can function as a linguistic mechanism to enhance production, and it is not linked to a low level of development in one language or the other.

However, despite such positive findings on codeswitching, the reality of bilin-gual classrooms shows the dominance of the majority language. Quiroz (2001) argues that the bilingual program in the school she studied – a program similar to the one featured in this research – was understood to be ‘not regular’ and was constantly measured by the yardstick of the mainstream classrooms. The bilingual classroom, although often described as a ‘safe haven’, was also under-stood to be socially marginalized. In the school in which I did my research, this was certainly the case, and since success in the bilingual classroom meant ‘promotion’ to a monolingual classroom, there was some perception of the bilingual classroom as being remedial as well. Further, my observations over the course of the year showed increasing use of English by the children among themselves and during the periods of Spanish instruction, which initially had been almost categorically in Spanish.

Potowski (2004, 2007) has shown that even in a Spanish-English dual lan-guage program in Chicago, in which Spanish enjoyed a much higher prestige than in the transitional program in which I did my research, the children overwhelmingly used English with peers. This was true for the children who spoke Spanish as their first language as well as the children with Anglophone backgrounds. This pattern persisted in Spanish lessons, during which only 56% of the utterances of the four children studied were in Spanish. The classroom in Potowski’s study differs from the one in which my data were collected in one significant way: in the dual language program in her study, only half of


the children had Spanish as their home language, while in the classroom in my study, all of the children did. Nonetheless, the analysis below will show patterns in these data similar to those in Potowski’s study. These findings speak to the awareness of these children of the role of English in their U.S. communities, regardless of the languages used in their homes or classrooms.

The research participants

The data for this analysis were recorded in May of 2004 at the end of the first year of research. On this day, my research assistant, Kevan, accompanied me to the school for the second time. We were taking part in the afternoon classes, which were held in Spanish. The classroom teacher asked Kevan to read a section of the social studies book with the fourth graders, and work on orally completing discussion and comprehension questions in the text. Kevan (K) will be referred to as the teacher within this analysis, as that is the role he played in this interaction.

Although the focus of this study is this 30 minute conversation, informa-tion about the individual speakers and generalizations about their language use gathered from the larger research project will also be integrated into the analysis. The four fourth graders in the classroom were two girls, Dora (D) and Lucia (L) and two boys, Miguel (M) and Antonio (A). 2 Dora and Lucia were best friends, but Miguel and Antonio were less closely aligned. This difference in alignment will become readily apparent through the following examples, and is also an important aspect of the gender identities the children construct.

In addition to a difference between the boys and girls in terms of the nature of their dyadic relationships, there were also background differences which contributed to their linguistic choices. Although all four of the children were born in Mexico, other factors contributed to differences in language proficiency and orientation toward the U.S. Both girls had been in the U.S. since they were preschoolers and had attended their current school in the bilingual program since the age of four. They both had older siblings who were proficient English speakers and parents who had permanent employment. In the year I had contact with them, they did not visit Mexico at all. In short, all of these social factors contributed to both proficiency in English and a self-identity that was rooted in the U.S., not Mexico.

The boys, in contrast, had been in the U.S. for shorter periods of time, Miguel having attended this U.S. school for only part of the year in Kindergarten and first grade. He was present for the whole year in second through fourth grade, apart from long vacations his family took in Mexico. Antonio had attended school in the U.S. since Kindergarten, so had a more continuous record of schooling in the bilingual program than Miguel, but had not been in the U.S.

j. fuller 189

as long as Dora and Lucia. Their family backgrounds also differed from the girls’; Miguel was the oldest child in a family in which the parents did not speak much English, and thus did not have older siblings who brought English home with them. During the 2003–2004 academic year, he spent an entire month in Mexico during the winter, and indicated a desire to return to Mexico permanently. Antonio had an older brother, but he was only one year older and also in the bilingual program, so in his case, too, there was limited influence from the English of older siblings in his household. His parents also did not speak much English, according to the reports of his teachers and my own observation at a chance meeting with his mother at the school. At the end of October 2004 he and his family went to Mexico and did not return during the rest of the academic year.

The social differences between the two gender groups are considerable, and prevent any conclusions about language choice being a simple gender differ-ence. However, it must be noted that by objective standards, the girls did not have higher proficiency in English. When the children were divided into groups for ESL instruction, Antonio was in the highest group, along with two older children, and Dora, Lucia and Miguel were all in the middle group. Further, the ESL teacher’s informal comments to me about the children’s academic progress indicated that although Miguel was less confident about his English skills, he was as proficient as the girls in his grade. The background factors discussed above must therefore be seen primarily as influences on the identities of the children, but not circumstances that would inevitably lead to the patterns of use of Spanish and English that they produced. The following analysis will focus on how these language choices, superimposed on gender differences in collaboration in discourse, are part of how these children use language to construct their social identities.

Speaker roles and repertoires

Kevan, the ‘teacher’ for this lesson, was a researcher in the classroom, as men-tioned above. He learned Spanish as a young adult and his Spanish was very fluent. He had lived in Mexico for 13 years prior to the time of this recording. In previous and subsequent interactions with the Spanish teacher and the children in the bilingual classroom, he was fully accepted as a Spanish speaker. That is, the children did not, as they often did with me, switch to English to address him, or risk making jokes or using profanity in his presence assuming he would not understand. Thus his proficiency in Spanish was unlikely to have been a factor in the children’s language choices. However, the fact that he himself used some switching back and forth between languages may have influenced the children’s language choices.


After it was decided that Kevan would read from the Spanish textbook with the four fourth graders, the five of them sat down at a table together. At this point, I set up the recorder and said to Lucia (in English), ‘Okay. Introduce yourself please.’ Although Lucia initially responded in Spanish, throughout the following 47 lines which are occupied with the children and Kevan introducing themselves (and making jokes about the introductions), there is much back and forth between the two languages; an excerpt of this is given in [1]. (See Transcription Key following example [1].)

Example [1]

(Here and in all examples: K=Kevan, M=Miguel, A=Antonio, D=Dora, L=Lucia)

M: My name is Miguel. ¡Ya! [My name is Miguel. There!]A: Ahí está [There you are.]K: ¿Miguel-Ya? [Miguel-there?]M: Le toca a aquél. [It’s that guy’s turn.]J*: {chuckling} Miguel [*the author]A: Le toca a Dora. [Dora’s turn.]L: His turn.D: Déle. [Go on]A: ¡A:::y! /¿ (y) por qué (yo)/ si les toca:? [O:::h! (and) why (me) if it’s your turn?]K: /¿Te llamas Miguel-Ya?/ [Your name’s Miguel-there?]

Transcription Key:

It’s your turn utterances in regular font are in English

Ahí está utterances in bold are in Spanish

[there you are] utterances in square bracket and italics are translations of the Spanish utterance directly above

/hello/ utterances between slanted lines overlap with the utterances above or below also within slanted lines/hello/

(why me) segments within parentheses are somewhat unclear and indicate some uncertainty about the transcription

xxx unintelligible word

! excited tone

? rising intonation

falling intonation

j. fuller 191

Kevan, when it is his turn, says in English ‘And my name is Kevan’, further contributing to the bilingual mode of the interaction. As he subsequently reported to me:

On this particular day, I felt pushed and pulled about in a CS [codeswitch-ing] kind of way. I was very aware of pressures to go one way or another as far as language choice was concerned and sometimes of not knowing really which way was the better way to go due to not having time to think. What I mean is that my recent personal experiences with code-switching have always been rather pleasurable, but in this case, the experience was rather stressful… I suppose I went into the reading thinking that it was Spanish-language time and even though I knew there were no strict rules about using one language or another and expected and hoped that code-switching would occur, I thought Spanish would, and should, be the baseline language. The reading was in Spanish and officially it was the Spanish language part of the day. I guess I also expected code-switching to occur, but perhaps I didn’t expect to be ‘dragged’ into the center of it. I thought I would be on the side-lines, cleverly directing the lesson, but that the majority of the data would be coming from the students themselves and that I would somehow be exempt, or not so directly affected. I found it impossible, though, to avoid having to make decisions again and again as to which language to use… (Fieldnotes, May 18, 2004)

The role of the teacher in this interaction is not exactly the same as their usual teacher for the subjects they have in Spanish. Their classroom teacher (a native of Colombia who is an English-Spanish bilingual) rarely addressed them in English; in discussions with me, she stated that this was a conscious choice, as her job was to help them learn and maintain Spanish. Kevan, in contrast, established early on that he was a willing participant in codeswitching, allowing the children to be in a bilingual mode. Codeswitching can thus be analyzed as part of the discourse strategies of the children; that is, their language choices were not the result of a strongly enforced norm. These language choices will be discussed in detail in the next section, and in the following section, an analysis of collaborative sequences will be presented.

Language choices: the (gendered?) role of English

Social identity, including but not limited to gender identity, can be constructed through the use of a particular language (Kroskrity 2000). As can be seen in Table 1, both girls speak English around 68% of the time during this interaction. Antonio uses English only 17.4% of the time, and Miguel, whose preference for Spanish was the strongest of the four, uses English in only four utterances


(5.6%). Because the lesson revolved around reading from a Spanish textbook, the high rate of English used by Lucia and Dora are clearly not dictated by the topic or setting. We must assume, then, that they have social motivations for their language choices that go beyond adherence to classroom norms.

Table 1: Individual speaker language choices (by turns)

Speaker Spanish English CS

L 16/62 (25.8%) 42/62 (67.7%) 4/62 (6.5%)

D 14/57 (24.6%) 39/57 (68.4%) 4/57 (7.0%)

A 36/46 (78.3%) 8/46 (17.4)% 2/46 (4.3%)

M 64/71 (90.1)% 4/71 (5.6%) 3/71 (4.2%)

Beyond this raw count of language choice, it is interesting to note the differences in addressees across gender lines (see Table 2). Antonio and Miguel each have only one English turn that is not directed at the teacher; Antonio’s exception is a general comment, directed at both the teacher and his peers, while Miguel’s is a peer-directed turn. This pattern of using English primarily with the teacher, and less with one’s peers, does not hold for the girls, however. Almost half of Lucia’s English turns are directed at her peers, as are over half of Dora’s. The girls, unlike the boys, use English liberally with all interlocutors.

The use of Spanish does not show a similar gender difference. The distribution of Spanish shows that this language, unlike English, is used by all speakers for all addressees (see Table 2). The overall pattern, then, is that the girls speak more English than Spanish, but use both languages to all interlocutors. The boys use more Spanish overall, and use English primarily for turns directed at the teacher. While the use of English with the teacher may seem counter-productive in a Spanish lesson, the fact that the teacher himself used some English, and that this classroom is situated in a community and school in which English proficiency is clearly valued more highly than Spanish language skills, use of English with the teacher begins to make a certain amount of sense. The gender difference in peer-directed language use shows a different orientation to peer talk between the girls and boys: while the boys clearly prefer Spanish, the girls use more English.

Table 2: Individual speakers’ use of Spanish/English turns to peers or teacher 3

% of Spanish to peers (or all)

% of Spanish to teacher

% of English to peers (or all)

% of English to teacher

Lucia 6/16 37.5% 10/16 62.5% 20/42 47.6% 22/42 52.4%

Dora 8/14 57.1% 6/14 42.9% 22/39 56.4% 17/39 43.6%

Antonio 14/36 38.9% 22/36 61.1% 1/8 12.5% 7/8 87.5%

Miguel 22.64 34.4% 42/64 65.6% 1/4 25% 3/4 75%

j. fuller 193

This pattern of language use suggests a gendered interpretation of these lan-guage choices. Within this community of practice, the girls use more English, thus the interpretation is available that speaking English is something that girls do (especially to peers, or in situations in which it is not required in the classroom). Through this association, speaking English becomes available as a resource for constructing femininities and it becomes less attractive as a means of constructing masculinity.

Of course, it is not just gender identity that is constructed through these language choices. A salient aspect of identity which is constructed through language choice is identification with ethnic or national groups. Thus Dora and Lucia, through their use of English, construct an identity which is more firmly rooted in the U.S., which contrasts with the boys’ identity construction through Spanish, which links them more heavily to Mexico. Given the social background differences between the boys and the girls in this group, these language choices could be explained by the backgrounds and developing ethnic/national identities of the children, without reference to gender. Yet disregarding the potential of these differences in code choice as gender markers seems to ignore an important aspect of the social negotiations that are occurring among these four children. Specifically, the girls use English to construct a ‘best friends’ dyad that is gendered. Although such friendship ties are hardly reserved for girls, in this case there were acted out by adherence to gendered patterns of behavior. When the girls gave each other gifts or shared items they brought from home, they were often gender specific items such as lip gloss or perfume. When they spent time together at recess, it was often just sitting and talking on the swings or monkey bars, as opposed to playing basketball or marbles, as they boys did. Further, as shown by Thorne (1993), although both boys and girls form and display best friendships, it is the ‘popular’ girls – children who are most salient to other children and adults – who conform to the stereotype of girls having dyadic relationships revolving around the construct of best friends. (‘Popular’ boys are leaders of large, hierarchical groups.) Thus, there are feminine aspects to the best friends concept, as well as in the way it is carried out by these particular girls. Their use of English is not the result of their gender, but a means to construct their ‘best friends’ status, which is part of the construction of hegemonic femininity. These girls’ use of English grows from not just their linguistic abilities but also the fact that their friendship dyad, unlike all the other friendship alignments in the classroom, consists solely of proficient English speakers. All of the other close friendship dyads or triads in the classroom contain at least one speaker who is a relatively recent immigrant and thus is less comfortable with English. Although Dora and Lucia are not necessarily the most proficient English-speaking individuals in the classroom, their


friendship group is the most uniformly proficient in English (see Fuller 2007 for a more detailed discussion). Because of this, they are uniquely able to use English to index their friendship, and through the use of this code to construct identities which belong to the girls, English becomes associated with feminine identity.

In order to further focus on how these language choices construct gender identity, they will be superimposed on another feature of conversation, namely collaborative speech. In the next section, I show how the use of English and one type of collaborative speech are used to construct feminine identities for the girls, and how other aims in collaboration are part of the performances of masculinities.

Collaborative sequences

The second level of language which can contribute to identity construction is that of communicative practices which are associated with a particular social group (Kroskrity 2000). In this analysis, I examine conversational collaboration, a practice which has often been associated with female speakers, as discussed above. For this analysis, I have defined collaborative sequences as sequences in which the children repeat, continue or elaborate upon utterances of other chil-dren in a supportive manner. Mocking repetitions or disagreements building on another child’s utterances are not included in this analysis. Although collabora-tive sequences may contain overlap, this overlap must be distinguished from bids to take the floor away from another speaker. In terms of content as well as timing, collaborative utterances reinforce another speaker’s contribution. Thus, the decision about what is to be counted as collaborative is determined by the proposition represented as well as the sequential patterning.

For example, in these data, taken from a classroom task which involved reading in a social studies book and then answering questions the teacher asked about the text, many of the collaborative sequences involved the repetition or elaboration of another child’s answer. So, in [2] below, while the simultaneous turn in line 2 is not interpreted as collaboration, the sequential repetition in lines 4 and 5 is.

Example [2]

1. K: Y que ven ahí en la foto. [And what do you see there in the picture.]

2. M/A/D/L: Alligator.

3. K: Ay, si es cierto. It’s like a big, adult alligator? Or [Oh, yeah, that’s right.]

4. L: No, a little ba:by

5. D: A baby.

j. fuller 195

Another common type of collaborative sequence in these data is digressions from the content of the lesson, in the form of made-up stories, jokes or puns. When one child begins such a digression, the participation of others in the topic is categorized as collaboration. A simple example of this is given in [3]; here, Antonio has claimed to be a bear, and Miguel’s utterance several lines later continues this fantasy.

Example [3]

The teacher is trying to get the children to discuss the role of humans in the survival of endangered species.

A: (Debería de) entender yo soy ya soy un osito de noche. [(You should) understand I’m now I’m a little night bear.]L: {giggles} ¡Ha! [Ah!] {general giggling}K: Bueno. Sigue: /(.)Dora./ En la página ¿qué? Quinientos cincuenta y (ocho) [Okay. D-’s next. On page what? Five hundred fifty (eight)]M: Pobre osito. [Poor little bear.]

Each of the four children in this conversation has a quite different pattern of participation in collaborative sequences, especially when the language of their collaboration is included in the analysis. Each of the children will be discussed separately, and then compared. An overview of the data is given in Table 3. A distinction is made between providing the initial turn in a collaborative sequence and participating in subsequent turns in collaboration with other speakers. (In three of the longer sequences, the speaker who provides the initial turn also provides further turns in the sequence, and thus the speaker’s participation is counted in both columns.)

A further distinction is made between the number of sequences a speaker participates in and the number of turns he or she produces. Although some sequences are short, as in [3], in which Antonio and Miguel each have only one turn, some are much longer and individual speakers produce up to seven turns within the sequence. Thus counts of both the number of sequences and the number of turns, and what languages the turns were produced in, are included in Table 3.


Table 3: Participation in collaborative sequences, by speaker

Participation in a collaborative sequence (non-initial turn)

Initial turn in a collaborative sequence

Dora 9 sequences14 turns (5 English, 7 Spanish, 1 Codeswitching)

7 (4 English, 1 Spanish, 2 CS)

Lucia 6 sequences9 turns (7 English, 2 Spanish)

3 (2 English, 1 Spanish)

Miguel 7 sequences14 turns (12 Spanish, 2 Codeswitching)

4 (2 Spanish, 2 English)

Antonio 3 sequences3 turns (all Spanish)

4 (all Spanish)

Of the 18 collaborative sequences identified in these data, Dora was actively involved in 14 of them. She produced the initial turn in five, and the initial turn plus at least one other turn in two additional sequences. She collaborated in sequences begun by other speakers in an additional nine instances. The picture of the positioning of the children with relation to each other will begin to become clear with a description of Dora’s collaborative sequences. When she provides the initial turn for collaborative sequences, she is supported three times each by Lucia and Miguel, twice by Miguel and Lucia together, and once by Miguel and Antonio. Thus, we already see a strong alignment between Dora and Lucia, and Dora and Miguel, with less participation in this type of talk by Antonio.

Dora’s alignment with the other children in the group is also indicated in that she repeats or enhances Lucia’s utterances four times, Miguel four times, and Antonio only once. Her use of English for collaboration is the majority pattern, which is unsurprising given her overall high rate of English use in this interaction. Both of the triggering utterances Dora makes which are categorized as codeswitching contain only one Spanish word in an otherwise English sentence; she makes only one Spanish utterance which begins a col-laborative sequence, and this is a pun based on Spanish words. In her other collaborative turns, six of the seven Spanish turns are all within one long sequence, shown in [3], which is also based on a Spanish language feature, in this case gender marking. The joke is about using the feminine marked word for teacher, maestra, directed at Antonio. In this sequence, Dora joins Lucia and Miguel in poking fun at Antonio. The children have been taking turns using the teacher’s book to read aloud, and as they pass the book around there is a recurring discussion revolving around pretending that the child who

j. fuller 197

currently has the teacher’s book is the teacher. In [4], Antonio has the book, and they begin calling him maestra ‘teacher/FEM’ instead of maestro ‘teacher/MASC’. This is necessarily done in Spanish, as the English word teacher does not carry gender marking.

Example [4]

Antonio (A) has just taken the teacher’s (K’s) book to read aloud; M, L and D (students) are teasing him.

D: /The teacher./M: /La maestra. [The teacher/FEM]L: La maestra./ [The teacher/FEM]D: La maestra. [The teacher/FEM]M: {to A-} La ma- ¿como dijo? Le están diciendo,/maestro/ [The/FEM tea- What did you say? They’re calling you names, tea:cher/MASC]D: /La maestra/ va a en/señar/ [The teacher/FEM is going to teach]L: /Teacher,/ teacher, teacher.D: La maes: [The/FEM teach]K: Maestro: [Teacher/MASC]M: Maestra:. [Tea:cher/FEM]D: Ha, verdad [Hey, gotcha]K: Maestro Antonio reprueba, ¿ey? [Teacher/MASC Antonio gives Fs, just so you know] D: ¿Maestro Antonio? [Teacher/MASC Antonio?]M: Maestra. [Teacher/FEM]D: ¿Maestra Antonia? [Teacher/FEM Antonia?]K: Ho:, ya. Pónganse en paz. [Hey, come on. Settle down.] D: Antonia

In this and in the other case in which she uses Spanish, Dora is following the language of the previous turn, i.e., the peer utterance she is supporting. A further


example is shown in [5]. Here, the teacher has asked them about the locations listed in the poem they just read, and Antonio has responded besar ‘to kiss’ (something which was mentioned in the poem, causing a round of giggles by the children). Kevan begins to respond to this answer (kissing is not a location), and Lucia and Dora complete this thought for him.

Example [5]

K: (Ey), pero eso no es un sitio, es un, (un) [(Yep), but that’s not a place, it’s a, (a)]L: {giggles} una acción. [an action]D: Sí, es una acción. [Yeah, it’s an action.]

All of Dora’s other collaborative sequences are in English, three of which involve the juxtapositioning of her English contribution with a previous Spanish utter-ance, and three of which are part of a larger sequence that is in English. An example of Dora’s use of English following a Spanish turn is given in [6].

Example [6]

The discussion of protection of endangered animals has swerved off into a dis-cussion of how to eat them; a previous exchange discussed crocodile barbeque.

M: /Yo xxx hamb/urguesa {makes long slurping noise} [I xxx hamburger]D: Hamburger.

Lucia’s participation in collaboration shows a similar pattern. Her utterances are repeated/enhanced by Dora three times (and never by the boys), and she repeats and elaborates on utterances made by Dora three times. She also repeats/enhances sequences in which Dora and Miguel are participating an additional three times, one of which is the maestra sequence shown in [3]. This pattern of collaboration supports the interpretation that Lucia’s main alliance is with Dora. In [7], we see how Lucia repeats and then elaborates on an answer Dora gives to a question from the teacher, showing their alignment and cooperation in the classroom discussion.

Example [7]

The girls have been asked to describe the forest they supposedly visited on a class trip.

j. fuller 199

D: We don’t know.L: We don’t know. We didn’t go::.

Lucia also participates in one collaborative sequence involving both Miguel and Antonio, using English to enhance their Spanish narrative (see [8]). Lucia’s participation in this exchange is an interesting move in terms of identity con-struction. She is aligning herself with the boys by joining in their diversion, but at the same time her contribution is not entirely coherent with the plot being made up by the boys. Although it appears to be a representation of how someone (Antonio’s fictitious killers?) would speak, it does not fit neatly into the rest of the narrative. Furthermore, making it stand out is her language choice; while the rest of the story is constructed in Spanish, and the teacher’s responses to it are also in Spanish, Lucia uses English for her contribution. Thus, she manages to both include herself in the boys’ play as well as distinguish herself from them with this turn.

Example [8]

The children have been asked to tell about their trip to the woods, and Antonio provides this account, aided by Lucia and Miguel. K is the teacher.

A: Me raptaron [They kidnapped me.]K: No sé. [I don’t know.]A: Y me mataron así pew pew pew [And they killed me like this pow pow pow]K: Cómo que te mataro:n. {laughing slightly} [What do you mean they killed you.]L: I just wanna get those people {laughs}M: Lo mata:mos. [We killed him.]

Overall, Lucia’s language choices, even more than Dora’s, reflect her strong orientation to English. As can be seen above, she contributes to otherwise Spanish collaborative sequences in English, including, nonsensically, the maes-tro sequence in [4]. Only once does she switch to Spanish in a collaborative sequence (shown in [9]), and even in this case she rounds out the sequence with an English utterance. Her contribution about the escalagrama in line 3 is somewhat nonsensical and unintelligible, but she comes into the conversation more strongly when she picks up on the idea of skating, fleshing out Miguel and Dora’s mention of skating with an emphatic restatement of their proposition.


Example [9]

D: Yeah, we went to the playa once. [beach]

M: Yeah, we went / to the playa once./ [beach]

L: / En en /la (escala/grama)/ [on on the (climbogram)]

M: /Skating/ también. [too.]

D: Ska/ting./

L: /Skat/ing. We went /skating./

In all other cases, Lucia either maintains the use of English or switches to that language to repeat or enhance a peer’s utterance, as she does in [8], above. This juxtapositioning of English comments in otherwise Spanish sequences is an especially strong sign of her tendency to use English as an integral part of her identity construction.

Antonio is the least involved in collaborative sequences started by others. All of Antonio’s active contributions to collaborative sequences are done in Spanish, and in coordination with Miguel, although in one Dora is the original speaker in the sequence. This sequence involves a pun based on the word aguadulce (literally, ‘sweet water’, meaning ‘fresh water’), and she says that aguadulce is the tears from a girl named Dulce. As exemplified in [12] below, Antonio is a devoted punster and it appears that he simply cannot resist participating in this sequence. But aside from this one instance, in which his motivation can be at least partially attributed to the content of the sequence and not collaborative spirit, Antonio provides only two elabora-tions of Miguel’s utterances, and both of these are minimal. In [10], the teacher has been discussing the fate of alligators, and asks if people should kill them. Miguel’s answer, and Antonio’s elaboration of it, is a joke about barbecuing the alligators. In [11], the teacher asks if there are any cousins in the class, and after Miguel answers si ‘yes’, Antonio elaborates on this answer by pointing out that Miguel himself is the cousin of another child in the classroom.

Example [10]

M: Barbecue.

A: (Vamos a) hacer barbe/cue./ [(We’re going to) prepare a barbecue.]

j. fuller 201

Example [11]

K: ¿Hay primos aquí adentro, de la clase? [Are there cousins here inside, inside the class?]

M: /Sí./ [Yes.]

A: /¡Ha,/ tú! [Hey, you!]

This begins to look like a gendered pattern, in which the girls provide conver-sational back-up for each other but boys do so to a far lesser extent. However, the data from Miguel belie this interpretation, as he is actively involved in 11 collaborative sequences, producing more collaborative turns than Lucia and almost as many as Dora. There are two differences between Miguel and the girls, however, which are significant. The first is language choice; none of Miguel’s contributions to collaborative sequences started by others are in English, although two of them are in Spanish-English codeswitching. In both cases, however, these mixed language utterances are repetitions of other mixed language utterances, as shown in his first utterance in [9], above. The remain-ing turns in collaborative sequences produced by Miguel are in Spanish. This obviously fits with the fact that Miguel speaks Spanish the vast majority of the time in this interaction, and suggests that he is most comfortable chiming in when the rest of the conversation is in Spanish, too. Antonio uses even more Spanish in his contributions, although his overall production of English in this interaction is higher. This seems to indicate that for the boys, unlike the girls, the language which indexes ingroup collaboration is Spanish.

Another significant difference between Miguel’s patterns of collaboration and the girls’ is that three of his collaborations show support of Antonio, with whom the girls rarely collaborate. Perhaps more significant is the reciprocity of this; Antonio collaborates primarily with Miguel.

A further trend which separates the children along gender lines is the ten-dency for the girls to repeat or rephrase more than the boys, who do more collaboration in digressions from the topic at hand. Since the category of ‘col-laborative sequences’ I have constructed includes a wide range of conversational functions, it is worth looking at this distinction between two types of collabora-tion more closely to see how it patterns in terms of gender.

Of the eighteen collaborative sequences I have identified in these data, eight of these involve diversions from the task. Miguel participates in all eight of these sequences, Antonio in five, Dora in three and Lucia in only two. Although Miguel is clearly the most eager participant in these sequences, and initiates the most (four), Antonio initiates three, while Lucia initiates none and Dora only one, the afore-mentioned aguadulce example. In two of the sequences


discussed above, we see that Antonio comes up with a fantasy – in [3], he is a bear and in [8] he has been kidnapped while on a trip to the woods– and the other children contribute to the storyline. A further example can be seen in [12], where Antonio begins another digression and is joined by Miguel. Here, Antonio makes a pun based on the phonetic similarity of caimanes (caimans, a kind of crocodilian) and the Spanish verb caer(se) ‘to fall down’.

Example [12]

A: Los caimanes se caen mucho. [Alligators fall down a lot.]K: Haja. [Aha.]M: /(Por eso es) que se /llaman caimanes. [(That’s) why they’re called alligators.]A: Se caen. [They fall.]M: Porque se caen mucho. [Because they fall a lot.]

What is beginning to emerge is not a distinction between collaboration and non-collaboration, but different types of collaboration. The girls frequently repeat and elaborate each other’s answers to questions posed by the teacher. In fact, four of the six sequences Lucia participates in are of this type, the exceptions being her participation in the maestro sequence in [4] and her one line contribution to Antonio’s kidnapping story in [8]. She does not initiate any diversions from the academic lesson that result in collaborative sequences. Nine of Dora’s 14 collaborative turns are also repetitions and elaborations of answers provided by others that are part of the on-task talk of their lesson. As mentioned above, she initiates one diversion (the original aguadulce joke) and participates in three others: the maestro sequence, a second instance of the aguadulce joke initiated by Miguel, and the minimal participation in the digression which began as a discussion of cooking alligators (shown in [6]).

This difference in the level of participation in collaborative sequences which are part of digressions from the academic task is, I suggest, part of the gender construction of these children. Indeed, it parallels the findings of Davies (2003), which show how girls can construct their identities while simultaneously par-ticipating in their schoolwork, but boys’ performances of gender identity often impeded their progress on academic tasks. We see here a version of the same pattern, in which Dora and Lucia collaborate to participate in answering the teacher’s questions, while Miguel and Antonio collaborate in digressions from the topics raised by the teacher.

j. fuller 203

However, the data exhibit greater complexity which must be considered. Because the girls collaborate largely in English, and they are taking part in Spanish language instruction, their utterances contribute a sense of their lack of cooperation, even when they are on task. Their collaboration thus fulfills its function of showing solidarity within their friendship dyad, but falls short in fulfilling its function in participating appropriately in the lesson.

Also, somewhat ironically, overall it is clear that Antonio and Miguel were more invested in doing well in school than either Dora or Lucia. This gen-eralization is based on my own experiences in working with the children on their assignments as well as informal discussions with their teachers about their academic progress. Also, we have evidence of this difference from this recording. For despite their willingness to provide collaborative answers to questions the teachers ask, Dora and Lucia also are frequently inattentive to the lesson in ways that Miguel and Antonio are not. Specifically, there are four instances in this 30 minute conversation in which conversations are begun which have nothing to do with the reading, even in a tangential manner; two are initiated by Lucia and two by Dora. There are also an additional three utterances by Lucia which seem to have nothing to do with the group discussion – for example, she mentions Spongebob (a cartoon character) and says that she wants to get a puppy – but the conversational context is not clear enough to include them definitively as off-topic. All of the other four off-topic exchanges show abandonment of any pretense at taking part in the lesson. At one point, while others are discussing what is happening to the animals and vegetation in the Everglades due to pollution, Lucia and Dora have a background conversation about whether or not they are almost finished with the textbook. Later, while the teacher is explaining the words flora and fauna and Miguel is attempting to paraphrase to show his comprehension, Lucia yells across the room to the classroom teacher to ask if they can go outside for recess. Similarly, Dora addresses another classmate outside of their group during the lesson. Finally, while the teacher is reading a section of the text aloud to the children, Dora initiates a whispered dialogue with Lucia about what other readings in the book they might work on next.

While four (or even seven) such instances of lack of participation in the group work led by the teacher in a half hour hardly constitute a steady barrage of disruption, it is not insignificant in terms of identity work. It must also be noted that Miguel and Antonio do not contribute any such utterances during the recording. They do engage in repeated diversions from the task – the col-laborative sequences discussed above as well as many one-liner jokes and comments that are not picked up by their classmates – but all of their diversions are at least tangential to the teacher-directed talk.


The overall picture of the boys’ behavior, then, is that although they did not bring up fully unrelated topics, as did Lucia and Dora, they were invested in creating reputations as witty contributors to the dialogue, and this involved diversions from the lesson. The boys collaborate primarily to divert attention from the lesson to their cleverness through puns or creative storytelling. While they are willing and able to join forces – with each other or the girls – to achieve this aim, the goal of their collaboration appears to be different than the girls. It is not about negotiating solidarity or maintaining strong relationships, but about constructing the identity of a clever and witty student. And in this area we see a marked gender difference. While it is possible to argue that trying to appear witty, as the boys do, is another face of being a good student, it is not possible to make this argument about students asking to go out for recess or other off-topic utterances made by the girls. The overall picture of the girls, then, is that they construct their friendship through supportive collaboration in their responses to the teacher, as well as in tangent conversation. However, they also undermine these displays of cooperation in the learning endeavor with turns which indicate inattention. Their use of English underlines their lack of orientation to the academic task; although they use the language which carries more prestige in the wide society, English, this is not the ideal choice for their Spanish lesson.

Conclusion

The means for gender construction among the female students in these data show unmistakable patterns. Identity as a girl here is constructed through the use of English, especially with peers, and conversational support of one’s friends. I suggest that the use of English as a resource for the construction of feminine identity is specific to this cohort and is the product of Dora’s and Lucia’s best friendship. Because their friendship group is the only one in the classroom in which all members are proficient English speakers, they can use English to mark group membership in their group. Once this pattern was established, English became something that girls did, at least in the fourth grade community of practice.

The use of collaboration to construct gender identity has been found in other research on girls’ and women’s talk (e.g., Coates 1996), and may well be part of a larger societal stereotype about feminine behavior (there are numerous linguistic studies which challenge this as a norm, e.g. Goodwin 2002). However, it is important to note that one finding of this study is that in terms of coopera-tion with the goals and aims of instruction, the boys were more compliant than the girls. There is a critical distinction between collaborating with one’s friends and cooperating with the overall aims and goals of instruction, and although

j. fuller 205

they are congruent for the girls in Davies’ research (Davies 2003), this study shows that they do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Masculine identity here is constructed through use of Spanish, especially with peers, and clever conversational gambits which veer off from the topic of the lesson but which also aim to show off knowledge or linguistic prowess (e.g., through puns). Objectively speaking, the boys did not have lower English pro-ficiency than the girls (indeed, Antonio was evaluated by the teacher as having higher proficiency), so their use of Spanish was not linked to lack of proficiency, although it was indicative of stronger ties to Mexico than were apparent for the girls. Their use of Spanish was part of the overall pattern of Spanish as the peer language in the classroom; violation of this norm would have indicated association with the girls’ norm of English use and codeswitching.

These patterns have become linked to masculinity and femininity through their daily enactment in this community of practice. That is, in other con-texts, agreement markers do not necessarily construct a feminine identity, and joking is not a direct index of masculinity. However, these linguistic practices can be tied in to gendered themes in the broader society. That is, the girls’ conversational support of each other is part of the construction of a best friends pattern which is stereotypically feminine (Thorne 1993), and boys’ use of collaborations for clever diversions is linked to the cultural norm of hegemonic masculinity being linked to displays of knowledge and ability (Kiesling 2001).

In this way, this research echoes other studies which show that gender differences in language use in bilingual communities are linked to gender roles in the community which constrain social behavior in general (e.g., Gal 1978; Swigart 1991; Winters and Pauwels 2005). In this study, we also see the influence of specific personal relationships and linguistic repertoires leading to gender differences in language use which are specific to this community of practice. There are two general themes that show how language and society are intertwined in the construction of identities by these children. First, English becomes available as a means to construct feminine identity through its use by Dora and Lucia in their friendship dyad. Second, collaboration per se is not linked to gender identity, but certainly the conversational goals which lead to different types of collaboration are shaped by larger societal norms for girls and boys. Thus, these children draw on both larger cultural themes as well as their own personal experiences to make choices about how to use language.

It is possible that this balance between local and societal linguistic norms might play out differently for speakers of different ages. This may be particu-larly true with regard to language choice, because younger speakers have less exposure to macro-level issues regarding the status of particular languages.


It seems likely that these pre-teens may be at a stage at which their personal experiences with specific codes have greater influence, and that older youths or adults might be less likely to respond to the linguistic performance of specific individuals as if they were representative of gender groups. Ultimately, however, all speakers make connections between the use of linguistic codes and the social categories of speakers. This research contributes to our knowledge about how these connections are made, and it should be no surprise that they are due to a complex interaction between the alignments among speakers and how speakers position themselves with regard to wider societal norms.

About the author

Janet Fuller is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Anthropology at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA.

Notes

1 I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper and Kevan Self for his assistance in this research.

2 All of the names of the children in this study have been changed.

3 Codeswitching was not included in this count, due to the low number of tokens containing both languages.

References

Bailey, Benjamin (2001) The language of multiple identities among Dominican Americans. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10: 190–223.

Becker, Ruth R. (2001) Spanish-English code switching in a bilingual academic context. Reading Horizons 42: 99–115.

Bowles, Hannah Riley, Linda Babcock and Lei Lai (2007) Social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it does hurt to ask. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 103: 84–103.

Bucholtz, Mary (1999) ‘Why be normal?’ Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28: 203–223.

Bucholtz, Mary (2000) Gender. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9: 80–83.

Chan, Grace (1992) Gender, roles, and power in dyadic conversations. In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz, and B. Moonwomon (eds) Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference 57–67. Berkeley: University of California.

Cheshire, Jenny and Penelope Gardner-Chloros (1996) Code-switching and the sociolin-guistic gender pattern. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 129: 5–34.

j. fuller 207

Coates, Jennifer (1995) Language, gender and career. In S. Mills (ed.) Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 13–30. London: Longman.

Coates, Jennifer (1996) Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Coates, Jennifer (2003) Men Talk. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Cook-Gumperz, Jenny and Margaret Szymanski (2001) Classroom ‘Families’: Cooperating or competing – girls’ and boys’ interactional styles in a bilingual classroom. Research on Language and Social Interaction 34(1): 107–130.

Davies, Julie (2003) Expressions of gender: An analysis of pupils’ gender discourse styles in small group classroom discussions. Discourse and Society 14(2): 115–132.

DeFrancisco, Victoria Leto (1998) The sounds of silence: How men silence women in marital relations. In Jennifer Coates (ed.) Language and Gender: A Reader 176–184. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Eckert, Penelope (2000) Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eder, Donna, Catherine Colleen Evans and Stephen Parker (1995) School Talk: Gender and Adolescent Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Fishman, Pamela (1983) Interaction: The work women do. In B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley (eds) Language, Gender, and Society 89–102. Newbury House, Rowley, MA.

Fuller, Janet M. (2007) Language choice as a means for shaping identity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17(1): 105–129.

Gal, Susan (1978) Peasant men can’t get wives: Language change and sex roles in a bilin-gual community. Language in Society 7: 1–16.

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (2002) Building power asymmetries in girls’ interaction. Discourse and Society 13(6): 715–730.

Hadi-Tabassum, Samina (2002) Language, Space and Power: A Critical Ethnography of a Dual Language Classroom. Dr of Ed dissertation, Teachers’ College, Columbia University.

Kiesling, Scott (2001) ‘Now I gotta watch what I say’: Shifting constructions of masculinity in discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 250–273.

Kroskrity, Paul (2000) Identity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9: 111–114.

Lakoff, Robin (1990) Talking Power: The Politics of Language. San Francisco: Basic Books.

Litosseliti, Lia (2006) Gender and Language: Theory and Practice. London: Hodder Arnold.

Lo, Adrienne (1999) Codeswitching, speech community membership, and the construc-tion of ethnic identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 461–479.

Madsen, Lian Malai (2003) Power relationships, interactional dominance and manipula-tion strategies in group conversations of Turkish-Danish children. In Jennifer Norman Jorgensen (ed.) Bilingualism and Social Relations: Turkish Speakers in North Western Europe 90–101. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.


Maltz, Daniel and Ruth Borker (1982) A cultural approach to male-female miscommu-nication. In John J. Gumperz (ed.) Language and Social Identity 196–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma (2002) Language and Identity. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes 475–499. Oxford: Blackwell.

O’Barr, William and Atkins, B. K. (1980) Women’s language or powerless language? In Jennifer Coates (ed.) Language and Gender: A Reader 377–387. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Ochs, Elinor (1992) Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piller, Ingrid (2001) Identity constructions in multilingual advertising. Language in Society 30: 153–186.

Pilkington, Jane (1998) ‘Don’t try and make out that I’m nice!’ The different strategies women and men use when gossiping. In Jennifer Coates (ed.) Language and Gender: A Reader 254–269. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Potowski, Kim (2007) Language and Identity in a Dual Immersion School. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Potowski, Kim (2004) Student Spanish use and investment in a dual immersion class-room: Implication for second language acquisition and heritage language maintenance. The Modern Language Journal 88(1): 75–101.

Quiroz, Pamela (2001) The silencing of Latino student ‘voice’: Puerto Rican and Mexican narratives in eighth grade and high school. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 32: 326–349.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie (2004) Constructing ethnicity in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(2): 163–195.

Swann, Joan and David Graddol (1988) Gender inequalities in classroom talk. English in Education 22(1): 48–65.

Swigart, Leigh (1991) Women and language choice in Dakar: A case of unconscious innovation. Women and Language XV: 11–20.

Talbot, Mary M. (1998) Language and Gender: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Tannen, Deborah (1993) The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and soli-darity in gender and dominance. In Deborah Tannen (ed.) Gender and Conversational Interaction 165–188. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thorne, Barrie (1993) Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Winters, Joanne and Anne Pauwels (2005) Gender in the transmission and construc-tion of ethnolinguistic identities and language maintenance in immigrant Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 25(1): 153–168.

Gendered choices, GAL 2010

Documents

Transcript of Gendered choices, GAL 2010