Multilingual Femininities in the Classroom

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the spoken interaction of the female students in the classroom to see what they have to say about their fellow undergraduates, the language and literacy practices of the academic community and their language repertoires. Similarly to their male counterparts, much of the interaction suggests a concern with acceptability and how tofit in with their peers. The female participants made more overt references to life stage than the male students. These were suggestive of conflicting subjectivities as they negotiated late adolescence and early adulthood. Pam Gilbert and Sandra Taylor (1991) discuss the way in which adolescence has been constructed as a time of youthful rebellion and self-expression, largely associated with teenage males. As they observe, while youthful rebellion is tolerated within certain boundaries as a normal developmental phase for teenage boys, teenage girls are positioned as young women from the onset of menstruation and are often under more pressure to obey norms governing responsibility and respectability.