The Language Teacher
02 - 2001
"There Are No Men and Women" An Interview with Aneta Pavlenko
Cheiron McMahill
GALE the Gender Awareness in Language Education SIG, aims to help members explore gender as a factor in linguistic interaction, in teaching, in research, and in teacher training. We also hope to encourage such research and its applications to the foreign language classroom. The interview with Aneta Pavlenko appeared in our December 2000 issue. It points to some of the cutting-edge research being done in this area and shows the interrelationship of gender with other important factors in language acquisition, especially race and class. For more information about GALE, contact co-coordinator Jane Joritz-Nakagawa <vf2j-nkgw@asahi-net.or.jp>. Regarding newsletter submissions or inquiries, contact Kathy Riley <rileykb@gol.com> or Louise Haynes <aidsed@gol.com>.
(Author's note: Aneta Pavlenko, an Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia taught a weekend seminar on gender and language education research for Temple University Japan, which unfortunately conflicted with the June, 2000, GALE symposium and retreat in Hiroshima. For those of you who were unable to attend, or who attended but wanted to know more about her, here are some excerpts of an email interview with a dynamic young professor who is shaking up the world of applied linguistics and inspiring many GALE members to take even greater risks with our own research.)
Q: When I first saw you at the AAAL conference in Vancouver, I was struck by your cosmopolitan air, poise, and determination. Please tell us about your background. Where are you from? How did you end up in the U.S. and in your current position?
A: I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and lived there for 26 years. I got my B.A. and M.A. in French and Applied Linguistics and have always been interested in teaching and learning languages. My mother, who is herself an English teacher, got me started on languages quite early, by speaking English to me from time to time, and by hiring a teacher of Polish for me when I was 7, and then a teacher of Spanish. Soon, I was hooked, and by the time I graduated from high school I spoke 6 languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, English, French and Spanish. I also dabbled a little in Swedish, Finnish, and German but not very successfully, as I was a very interactive learner and at the time there wasn't much contact with the speakers of these languages (while we did have international students from English- and French-speaking African countries, and from Spanish-speaking South American countries). I have continued practicing my languages with my international friends and reading books in a variety of languages and that exposure to the world (remember that I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s at the time when the Iron Fence was still present as a shadow) made me realize that a woman's position in the former Soviet Union was not very enviable. At the same time, while living there I never identified myself as a feminist. In 1989, I had a child as a single mother and was very concerned about raising the child in the country that did not treat either Jews or single mothers fairly. My mother and I decided to emigrate and left Kiev in December of 1989 as refugees stripped of citizenship. While many of our friends were leaving for Israel, we opted for the US, as we believed that there may be more opportunities there for a single woman with a mother and a child to support.
Q: One of the things that attracted me to you and your work was your research bringing together bilingualism, identity, gender, and personal narratives. How did you get interested in these topics? How did you become a feminist?
A: In the US, we settled in Reading, Pennsylvania, and I immediately started interviewing for teaching positions. I went to work as a part-time instructor of Russian and Spanish in two respective colleges, and soon took my GREs and TOEFL to apply to graduate school (part-time teaching did not seem like an appealing option forever). Two years later my family followed me to Ithaca, NY, where I got my Ph.D. in Linguistics. By that time, my personal history pretty much informed my studies and I conducted research on cognitive aspects of bilingualism. At the same time, the study of bilingualism seemed pretty stripped of personal insights and I felt that this was rather unfortunate -- thus, my interest in personal narratives, that was quite well received by colleagues. As I analyzed autobiographic narratives of various famous writers, I contacted as many of them as I could to check my analysis with them. One of them, Andrei Codrescu, sent me a very perceptive insight, saying that my analysis of these writings is very much like the surgeon operating on his/her own hand. Unfortunately, in our field one's own personal insights do not carry the same value as one's analysis of others' stories, which is why I continue analyzing other people's stories and, through them, telling my own.
My explicit interest in gender issues and my full conversion to feminism occurred in the summer of 1997 as I was taking a language and gender course during the Summer Linguistic Institute with two wonderful linguists, Bonnie McElhinny and Kira Hall, who pretty much opened my eyes to the powerful ways in which contemporary poststructuralist feminist theory can theorize gender. I immediately thought of ways in which this theory can be applied to theorize the role of gender relations in bilingualism and L2 learning. Soon after this course, I went back to my native country to collect some research data and to see my family. One day I was riding a bus with my brother, and he got out first and tried to give me a hand as I was getting out. Unconsciously I recoiled from his hand and he looked at me strangely and asked if I became an Americanized feminist or something along those lines. It was then that I realized that indeed I did and that I no longer fit really well in a society which prides itself in putting its women on a pedestal, but in reality constrains them in a myriad of ways. American feminism is hard if not impossible to explain back home, as to many it seems trivial.
Q: What direction do you see your research going in the near future?
A: My big agenda is to argue that at least some, if not all, research should be concerned with issues of power and social justice. At present, I am editing a special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism with my British colleague, Dr. Adrian Blackledge, on "Negotiation of Identity in Multilingual Contexts." In the intro to the special issue we argue that poststructuralist theory provides a very sophisticated theoretical framework both in its ability to frame the social in the sociolinguistic and in its emphasis on power relations, which, in turn, allows us to talk about issues of social justice. So, I guess, while I continue my research on various aspects of the bilingual mental lexicon, I will also continue examining how L2 users's identities both structure access to linguistic resources and interactional opportunities and get reshaped in the process. (A list of Pavlenko's past and forthcoming publications is provided at the end of this interview).
Q: I think many of us feel it is still a bit risky to address gender in our teaching or research. We may worry that our work will not be taken as "academic" if we focus on the issues dear also to our hearts or our politics. Do you have any words of encouragement for us?
A: Yes, I do see potential for not being taken seriously enough, but at the same time I see that studies that are strongly grounded in the data and theory do get well received, despite the political agenda. My personal opinion is that Bourdieu's theory for once does provide a very nice framework which allows us to combine sophisticated data analysis with powerful social justice arguments. For the most part, I have seen a lot of positive reactions to my own work and arguments. So far I had only one gender paper rejected and the reasons may have had to do more with the write up than with the content. At this point, I have the volume on SLL, bilingualism and gender coming out with Mouton De Gruyter; an article in the International Journal of Bilingualism on bilingualism, ideology and gender, and an article in Applied Linguistics on how language learning memoirs are a gendered genre. So I'd say in my personal experience the response has been positive.
Q: Often in my own presentations related to gender, I am asked questions about how men and women are different as language learners, whether male and female students should do pair-work together or not, and so on. These questions seem to assume essential categories of male and female that do not overlap and about which we can make overarching assumptions. Do you have any suggestions for responding to such questions?
A: I don't feel that we can change people's minds immediately, but I always do try by first throwing out the controversial statement, "There are no men and women" and then explaining what I mean. What I mean is that apart from general biological makeup, there are no general characteristics that all men and all women share. Oftentimes, men and women of a particular social class, cultural group or ethnicity would have more commonalities than differences. Thus, upper-middle class white women may have more in common with upper-middle class white men than with inner-city African-American women at times. Similarly, middle-class young Japanese females getting reading for their university entrance exams may have very different needs from young inner-city African-American women in Detroit dealing with drug issues and pregnancies. It doesn't make any sense to talk about just men and women, but rather about people as a whole and about gender as a system of social relations rather than an attribute of individuals. Once that point is made, I always bring in the notions of needs analysis and learner-centered instruction, which I think are very contemporary and powerful ones, and just say that we will need to treat each situation differently. And in some cases we will see that people will need to be grouped with people on the basis of other criteria than gender (class, linguistic background, etc.) and in other cases, single-sex groups may work better (in contexts where women otherwise may not be participating). As to who is better at language learning, the better student is whoever has better access to linguistic resources and interactional opportunities and more motivation. In contexts where men have more access they will be much more successful; in contexts where the access is equal but motivation is different, women may outperform men; yet, in contexts where men and women have equal access and equal motivation we won't see any gender differences at all. What is most important here is to emphasize that current research on brain differences has been severely criticized by a number of leading neurolinguists due to problems with research design, data analysis and numbers of research participants.
Q: Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with the members of GALE. I hope you will be coming back to Japan again soon to teach at TUJ. Bibliography of Aneta Pavlenko's Work
Lantolf, J. & A. Pavlenko (1995). Sociocultural theory and second language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 15, 108-124.
Lantolf, J. & A. Pavlenko (in press). (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In: M. Breen (ed.) Thought and actions in second language learning: Research on learner contributions. London: Longman.
Pavlenko, A. (in press). Language learning memoirs as a gendered genre. Applied Linguistics.
Pavlenko, A. (in press). Bilingualism, gender, and ideology. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Pavlenko, A. (2000). What's in a concept? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, (1), 31-36.
Pavlenko, A. (1999). New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory. Keynote article. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2,(3), 209-230.
Pavlenko, A. (1998). Transformation of gender in second language learning. In: S. Wertheim, A.Bailey, & M. Corston-Oliver (Eds.). Engendering communication. (pp. 439-448). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.
Pavlenko, A. (1998). Second Language Learning by Adults: Testimonies of Bilingual Writers. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 9 (1), 3-19.
Pavlenko, A., & Blackledge A.(Eds.). (forthcoming, Fall 2001). Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. International Journal of Bilingualism. Special issue.
Pavlenko, A., Blackledge, A., Piller, I. & M. Teutsch-Dwyer (Eds.). (2001). Multilingualism, second language learning, and gender. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Pavlenko, A. & J. Lantolf (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re) construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.). Sociocultural theory and second language learning. (pp. 155-177). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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