University teacher's gender and their approach to their EFL classes : Acase study

Abstract

Recent work on language and gender studies marks the shift away from explanations based on gender differences and simplistic generalisations to examine meaning and gender identities that are at work in various communities of practice and multiple settings. This dissertation aspires to address gender in an educational setting , namely teachers’ EFL community of Mostaganem University and the way they approach their classes by examining both their perceptions and institutional identity formation. Drawing upon community of practice perspective, the aim of this dissertation is twofold. First, to investigate whether gender influences the way male and female EFL teachers perceive their practice as an instance of negotiation meaning , testing Tannen’s ( 1990) assumption that male and female have different perceptions of their world- in this case teaching activity. Second, this study aspires to examine the way in which male and female teachers enact their institutional identities in their teacher -to -student classroom interactions , following the previous works done on gender and language in the workplace in which gender has been found to be a factor of variation in the interactional style of men and women in authority positions. With this end in view and with the goal to conduct a qualitative analysis, two research methods has been used. First , in line with the first aim of this work, a questionnaire has been handed and completed by 8male and 8female EFL teacher of Mostaganem University . Data have indicated that male and female teachers’ perceptions of their practice were more likely to be influenced by their respective subjects rather than their gender.

Second, to fulfil the second purpose of this dissertation, 6 EFL classroom interactions of 3 male and 3female participants were recorded and transcribed. On the basis of both discourse analysis framework and IRF( Initiation , Response , Feedback) structure , data revealed that in enacting their institutional identities, male and female teachers’ use of what studies associated with masculine discourse style and feminine speech pattrens was a matter of degree rather than neat distinctions . Results indicated that male and female teachers altogether tended to draw more upon English resources that are associated with feminine speech patterns in authority position than masculine discourse style. Yet, comparison between both gender groups revealed that female EFL teachers of Mostaganem University tended to exploit more feminine speech style and were more inclined towards downgrading power differences comparatively to their male colleagues. Male classroom interactions, by contrast, provided instances where they set off authority differences in their intercations ; a style associated with masculine speech patterns in authority positions. However, data Abstract IV contained examples of intra- group variations and intergroup differences in the interactional styles used by male and female teachers . In addition, Findings provided evidence that variations in speech patterns may occur with an individual teacher as some teachers did shift to an interactional style associated with the other gender , exploiting what Case (1995) called ' a wide verbal repertoire'