Bilingualism and Gender

Piller, Ingrid; Pavlenko, Aneta

doi:10.1002/9780470756997.ch19

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In Lai (2001), a group of 64 secondary students, who were classified as middle class elite, was compared with 70 low achievers from working class backgrounds. Although the dominance framework (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) may apply in other societies, it does not appear to be valid in the context of Hong Kong. Also in Lai (2002), Hong Kong students' attitudes towards Cantonese, English and Putonghua were analysed according to four factors, namely gender, socioeconomic status, cultural identities and MoI.…”

Section: Fallacy Of the Female Inferiority Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Language Attitudes: A Case of Postcolonial Hong Kong

Lai

2007

International Journal of Multilingualism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.gender is a more complex issue than simple biological differences. Adding new dimensions to the understanding of the relationship between gender and language, sociolinguists suggest that there are more social factors to take into consideration, for example, the relative power between males and females, their social networks and social status etc. (James, 1996).As previous research has established the significance of gender in the area of language attitudes, and yet not much attention has been paid to this in Hong Kong, the present research attempts to fill the gap by investigating the effect of gender on Hong Kong students' attitudes towards three languages, which were officially recognised in Hong Kong after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain in 1997. The three spoken languages are English (the international and the ex-coloniser's language), Cantonese (the vernacular language) and Putonghua (the national language of China, also known as Mandarin).The present study was carried out in two stages. First, a questionnaire survey was used to find out if gender contributes to any significant differences in the respondents' attitudes towards the three target languages. Being informed by the quantitative results, semi-structured group interviews were conducted to explore the possible reasons behind the significant attitudinal differences between the two gender groups. The present study is part of a bigger project, of which the global analysis of all questionnaires has been reported in Lai (2005). However, as language attitudes also vary with different factors, this study focuses on the effect of gender as an independent variable.In the following, the sociopolitical background of postcolonial Hong Kong will be first described to provide readers with the ne...

show abstract

Section: Fallacy Of the Female Inferiority Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Language Attitudes: A Case of Postcolonial Hong Kong

Lai

2007

International Journal of Multilingualism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Additionally, it is hoped that the present study will counter the bias (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) towards monolingual contexts in gender studies by adding to our understanding of the relationships between gender, language and identity in multilingual work contexts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Attitudes Towards Masculine Japanese Speech in Multilingual Professional Contexts of Hong Kong: Gender, Identity, and Native-Speaker Status

Itakura

2008

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The gendered speech in a foreign language has been found to pose barriers for learners due to different gender norms associated with their mother tongue and the foreign language. The problem is especially serious with the masculine and feminine forms of speech in the Japanese language, as these are strongly linked with social inequality between men and women. While a number of previous studies have been conducted on feminine style of Japanese and foreign language learners, still little is known of masculine speech of Japanese and foreign professionals who use Japanese in their intercultural work contexts. The present paper investigates attitudes towards the use of masculine Japanese among Hong Kong professionals. It includes the finding that, unlike in monolingual contexts, in multilingual contexts masculine Japanese was perceived among the respondents as projecting not only the quality of Japanese masculinity but also of group solidarity and native speaker status in the language and culture. While the respondents felt that it could be an effective device for constructing their professional identity, the decision to use it appeared to involve a careful analysis of their professional contexts and identity considerations. The implications of the analysis for teaching Japanese as a foreign language are discussed.

show abstract

“…Consequently, it has been my aim to contribute to the mainstreaming of this field ever since I co-edited a volume establishing it (Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller, & Teutsch-Dwyer, 2001). However, once my first co-authored handbook contribution in the field (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) was published, a development set in that became fully apparent to me only after about 5 years: No one ever cited that contribution, but from its publication onwards, my co-author, Aneta Pavlenko, and I continued to be invited to contribute on exactly the same topic over and over again. In a new field like multilingualism, language learning, and gender, it is possible to do something new and fresh a few times, and we did (Pavlenko & Piller, 2008;Piller & Pavlenko, 2009).…”

Section: Ingrid Piller Macquarie Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Comments on Handbooks: A Non‐Believer or a Convert?

Gass

2011

The Modern Language Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bilingualism and Gender

Cited by 15 publications

References 51 publications

Gender and Language Attitudes: A Case of Postcolonial Hong Kong

Gender and Language Attitudes: A Case of Postcolonial Hong Kong

Attitudes Towards Masculine Japanese Speech in Multilingual Professional Contexts of Hong Kong: Gender, Identity, and Native-Speaker Status

Comments on Handbooks: A Non‐Believer or a Convert?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About