“I Would Study Harder if I Was a Girl”: Gendered Narratives of Low-Achieving Male and High-Achieving Female EFL Learners

Abstract

Informed by a social and critical turn of reading practices and a poststructuralist paradigm of gender, this study delved into the commonly held belief that reading and language learning is a feminine domain, and examined the connection between the construction of gendered subjectivities and English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) reading practices among two high-achieving female students and two low-achieving male students in China and Sweden. The narrative inquiry revealed that gender played a role in shaping their decisions concerning the extent to which they invested in EFL reading. The students’ narratives, characterized by subject positions that revealed a feminization of EFL reading and a subjectification to the patriarchal order, leads to our argument that English reading in both contexts can be viewed as a right for men but as work for women. This view gives male students a legitimate excuse to distance themselves from avid reading, but female students an inclination toward contradictory feelings of both desire and stress.

Keywords:

• gender
• subject position
• subjectivity
• EFL reading practices
• language learning
• narrative