Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline

ABSTRACT

Fewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ‘role models’ in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined ‘teaching’ as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?

KEYWORDS:

• Discipline
• interactional sociolinguistics
• gender
• stereotypes

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to all the teachers and pupils that participated in this study, as well as Dr Christina Schelletter who kindly reviewed this paper before submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Joanne McDowell is a Reader in Linguistics in the School of English Language and Communication at the University of Hertfordshire, England. She specialises in the area of workplace discourse, gender studies, identity construction, classroom discourse and interactional sociolinguistics.

Revert Klattenberg is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Hildesheim. He earned his M.A. in English as a foreign language teaching. His research interests include conversation analysis in educational settings, linguistic (im)politeness research and men's talk in non-traditional occupations.

ORCID

Joanne McDowell http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2230-7161

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Banco Santander [C003680.2] and University of Hertfordshire [C004051.01].