Gender is simultaneously everywhere and no where. Everywhere, because as social experience, all human experience is arguably suffused with gender; nowhere, since gender is often so naturalised that it is invisible. Because gender is so wide-ranging, it spreads into every corner of the language classroom (and indeed of language education). Hence the need for research: for description of gendered experience, for raising teachers' and students' awareness of gender issues, for the promotion of change where equality of opportunity does not exist. And indeed research into gender and language education has been widespread (see Sunderland, 2000, forthcoming, for a 'State of the art article'), often drawing on 'answers' to research questions asked of other curricular subject areas. Influenced by the modern women's movement, the motivation for some research has been a feminist one, that is, a desire to expose female disadvantage, or to challenge inequality of opportunity. Areas of research and language education in which researchers have looked at gender difference with a less explicit feminist focus include language learning style and strategies (Oxford, 1994), performance (Arnot et al., 1996), 'ability' (Klann-Delius, 1981; Ekstrand, 1980; Clark, 1998), and student-teacher perceptions (Powell and Batters, 1985; Muchnick and Wolfe, 1992).
Research on gender and language education, through widespread, is however strangely patchy and often thin. Research on gender and language classroom interaction, for example, is sparse compared to research on gender and interaction in other subject classrooms (though see Good, Sykes and Brophy, 1973; Yepez, 1994; and Sunderland, 1998 on gender in whole-class work; and Gass and Varonis,1988; Provo, 1991; and Holmes, 1994, on pair and groupwork). In this area in particular, more research is clearly needed (see also Vandrick, 1999; Willett, 1996). Research into gender representation in language textbooks (e.g. Porecca, 1984; Jones, Kitetu and Sunderland, 1997), on the other hand, has been prolific, and has extended to grammars (Stephens, 1990), dictionaries (Hennessey, 1994) and language tests (Sunderland, 1995a). In addition to its relative paucity, I see two problems with current research on gender in language education. One is common, I would argue, to research in gender and education in general; the other applies specifically to language education. I will deal with the latter first.
As indicated, much research on gender and education has focused on different sorts of educational disadvantages experienced by women and girl learners, for example male dominance in the classroom; 'differential teacher treatment by gender,' by which males get more, and arguably better, teacher attention than females; and representation in textbooks in which female characters are variously stereotyped, trivialised, or rendered relatively invisible.
However, language education research is in a rather uncomfortable position as regards gender if viewed through a 'disadvantage' lens. While male dominance, differential teacher treatment and textbook bias have also been shown (in some research) to be true of some language classrooms, they are largely not reflected in performance, in that in many cultural contexts women and girls tend to obtain the better results (e.g. Arnot et al., 1996), to choose languages more when there is subject choice, and to be better represented as students in University Language Departments, and as language teachers in schools and in Higher Education.
Though this does not mean that findings of differential teacher treatment, male dominance or biased gender representation are irrelevant, or simply wrong -- logically, it could be that girls and women would do even better if male dominance, differential teacher treatment and gender-biased textbook representation did not obtain -- it is hard to convince teachers in the classroom and on pre- and in-service training courses of their importance, and of their suitability for classroom research, when it may seem that women and girls are doing very nicely. It is also hardly surprising that one focus of current research is why boys seem to be a minority group and/or the poorer performers in language classrooms (e.g. Barton, 1998; Callaghan, 1998). There is nothing wrong with this. However, at the same time, there is no reason to feel that the battle has been won for women and girls in language education. The apparent superior female performance in languages is not straightforwardly beneficial for women and girls. As regards both first language studies and foreign languages, girls may be being channeled towards being good readers and writers if teachers and girls themselves perceive these as relatively easy options; further, an arts- and humanities-based education may not stand girls in the best stead, career-wise. The implication for research is, then, not only to ask why boys avoid foreign languages and why girls select them, but why boys tend to select maths and sciences and why girls do not.
The second problem, which is shared by research into gender and education in general, but which is possibly worse in research into language education, is the more serious one of operating with two outdated, theoretically unsophisticated concepts of gender: (a) that gender is a simple masculine/feminine binary opposition; and (b) that gender is something 'determined' in a one-way process for or on the individual by a range of experiences. Operating with the first of these means a regrettable continuation of the focus on gender differences -- differences between female and male learners in such things as amount of talk, type of talk, language learning styles and strategies, performance on tests and exams, and perceptions (by learners, of themselves, their abilities, the subject, their teachers....).
This is similar to the research questions asked of classrooms in the 1970s which also tended to focus on gender differences, often with the implication that there was a necessary relationship between those differences and (usually female) disadvantage. 'Differences' studies show a (varying) tendency to generalise (and, though this is not their fault, to be generalised from by student researchers), and to give insufficient credence to individual differences. Operating with the second outdated concept, determinism, has meant in particular an unquestioning criticism of gender-biased textbooks and of differential teacher-treatment-by-gender, not only as description but also in terms of the effect these are seen to have. Individual agency, including scope for resistance, has been underplayed. To an extent the quest for differences, and view of gender as something unproblematically and straightforwardly 'determined', have both faded and fallen into disrepute, for a range of good and related reasons. This is true of educational research as a whole. Gender similarities and individual differences (and the importance of these) are now recognised; the corresponding stress on (even obsession with) gender differences is acknowledged as conservative and thus counterproductive; studies of gender 'differences' are carefully framed, acknowledging individuals' own agency, taking care to obviate readings of gender as in any way fixed (which would mean possibilities of change are limited); and language is now more frequently seen as more than a reflection of gender, and as something which might also help constitute it.
Research questions now accordingly tend to be about gender identities and gender representation -- the difficulty here for the researcher being not to assume female learners are disadvantaged, but at the same time not to lose sight of the fact that they might be. Some past research on gender in language education can in retrospect be reconceptualised as 'representation', most obviously, the representation of women and men, boys and girls in language textbooks, texts and grammar books, and the representation (or 'gendering') of male and females by teachers, and indeed by male and female students themselves, in talk; the data from these older studies is thus amenable to re-analysis. The idea of 'representation' is close to the important idea in contemporary gender and education research of gender identity, which may be 'shaped' (not determined) by representation. Male and female language learners can be then seen as having different sets of 'identities' -- as learners, as language learners, as well as boys/men and girls/women. However, more needs to be done in this direction in gender and language education research.
Research into gender and education as a whole has now also become much more self-reflexive and self-critical. There is now recognition that more teacher attention for males students does not necessarily mean better quality attention; that girls can be quiet for all sorts of reasons; that males talking more or receiving more attention on average is likely to be due to a small subset of boys; that a textbook text cannot simply determine either language learning or gender identity, but may rather simply play a role in shaping; that talk around a given textbook text may be more important that the text itself. It is a good idea to look not simply at textual bias, but how that bias is talked about by the teacher, and indeed how 'progressive' texts are dealt with (Sunderland et al., 2000, forthcoming). Interestingly, research into gender bias in language textbooks as texts alone has experienced something of a decline since the 1970s and 1980s. However, research into gender and language education is still less self-reflexive and self-critical than it should be. Applied Linguistics Conferences still typically include papers on gender differences, and (inexplicitly or explicitly) on how gender bias in language textbooks will 'determine' some aspect of language learning and/or gender identity, as if these were straightforward issues and, in particular, as if learners and indeed teachers did not have either the agency or the wit to resist any potentially shaping influences.
One way research into gender and language education could benefit and draw on current and more sophisticated understandings of gender is by moving from quantitative approaches to qualitative ones. 'Telling cases' (Mitchell, 1983) in interview data or even classroom transcripts, rather than representative cases, or survey data, can highlight our understanding of gender identity, which may after all be what lies behind much classroom interaction (see e.g. Sunderland 1995b, 1996), subject choice and even proficiency. Meaningful extracts, specially selected, rather than differences, numbers and degrees of statistical significance, may be the most fruitful way forward for the stage of maturity which gender and language education research has now reached.
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