Approaches to Gender and Spoken Classroom Discourse (Electronic book text)

Despite decades of research, gender and sexuality are still hugely problematic issues in education. Approaches to Gender and Spoken Classroom Discourse uses detailed linguistic analyses of classroom interaction to examine why this is the case and to offer some strategies for change. Using interactional and interview data from secondary school settings, the author considers how innovative combinations of different approaches to discourse analysis can help us to understand how gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in the secondary school classroom. She focuses mainly on student-student classroom talk using the analytical approaches of structural-functional discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis and queer theory. Additional insights are provided from interviews with teachers and students. In drawing together different theoretical perspectives alongside real-life examples from school classrooms, this volume offers a stimulating and fresh approach to the study of gender, sexuality and classroom discourse.