Identity work in the academic writing classroom: Where gender meets social class

Abstract

This article examines how male undergraduate students from linguistic minorities and non traditional university backgrounds perform gender (Butler 1990), viewed from the perspective of identity, on an academic writing programme and discusses what this tells us about the significance of gender for the teaching of academic writing in the contemporary academy. I focus on how gender is performed in talk about academic discourse and reveal the attraction of laddish identities for the men in the study. In so doing, I aim to deepen understanding in English for Academic Purposes of the importance of the social world for the social relations of the writing classroom and contribute to research that has considered identity in relation to the written outputs of students and scholars outside classroom settings (Hyland 2012;Ivanič 1998;Lillis 2001). To gain a more nuanced understanding of gender, an intersectional approach (Block and Corona 2016) is adopted, in which gender is viewed in intersection with social class. I argue that the gender-class nexus is of key significance for the teaching of academic writing in that it reveals how the social world orients language learners to language learning and sheds light on how students, as agentive beings, negotiate their positioning in discourses of deficit. I demonstrate how understanding of these issues can be developed through fine grained analysis of spoken interaction in the classroom and contend that language-as-resource approaches to linguistic diversity offer a productive way forward for EAP and, more widely, for teaching in contexts of linguistic diversity in higher education.

Influence of Text Mediation Upon the Academic Identities of Novice EAP Authors: Review and Prospect

“…The relationship between the use of personal pronouns or self-references and authorial identity construction has also attracted widespread attention from English as a Second Language (ESL) researchers at home and abroad (e.g., Tang & John, 1999;Hyland, 2002;Xu, 2011;Yang, 2015;Ju, 2016). Besides, the role of such sociocultural factors as gender, social class and ethnicity in the formation of identities of academic authors also aroused great interest of some scholars (e.g., Applyby, 2007;Preece, 2018;Thomas & Reinertsen, 2019). Other research explored such ethical issues of academic identity construction as text ownership and plagiarism among novice authors (Phan & Baurian, 2011) as well as such political issues as how to balance the global and local identities of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) authors (Gao, 2017).…”

“…Other research explored such ethical issues of academic identity construction as text ownership and plagiarism among novice authors (Phan & Baurian, 2011) as well as such political issues as how to balance the global and local identities of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) authors (Gao, 2017). By comparison, most of the available studies focused on the authorial identity construction of EAL academic authors (Hyland, 2002;Phan & Baurian, 2011;Xu, 2011;Yang, 2015;Rahimivand & Kuhi, 2014;Ju, 2016;Gao, 2017;Preece, 2018;Wang & Xu, 2019;Langum & Sullivan, 2020;Wang & Parr, 2020).…”

Blended Online EFL Activities in MOODLE for Higher Education

“…The CG consisted of six males (30%) and 14 females (70%), whilst the EG had five males (25%) and 15 females (75%). From past studies [92][93][94], gender differences can influence the development of writing performance and learning. Therefore, the variations among CG in the proportion of males and females may mislead the study result.…”

Beyond Language Classes: Semiotic Practices in PowerPoint Slideshows in Pharmaceutical English-Mediated Presentations

“…Identity can be defined as "the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and spaces, and how the person understands possibilities for the future" (Norton, 2013, p. 4). Within educational settings, identity issues are important because they shape how learners engage with others (Preece, 2018). An important theoretical concept in identity is related to learners' engagement with imagined communities and their associated imagined identities.…”