CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Barbara LeMaster (Anthropology and Linguistics, CSU, Long Beach), October 10, 2003.

"When, and how does gender language matter in Irish Sign Language, and in multilingual/multiethnic preschools in Long Beach?"

In both communities children acquire gendered forms of school language. In Dublin, Ireland, the gendering of Irish Sign Language (ISL) is extreme and affects women born before 1931 and men born before 1946. Yet, as adults, rather than embrace their gendered language differences, they sought ways to eradicate gender differences. In preschools in the United States, we also find gendering in school language practices, particularly in floor-getting behaviors. These gendered language behaviors are more subtly tied to gender, and not as markedly eradicated upon adulthood. My talk will use the two communities for comparison, but will focus on the preschool research to show how gender comes to matter to preschoolers in learning to get the floor. In other words, this paper primarily addresses how children learn to play school in gendered ways and shows how children come to embody gendered behaviors in school. In the preschool setting, we compared children?communicative behaviors at the start of the school year with their behaviors after they learned school rules. We were particularly interested in structured communication where teachers serve as gatekeepers to the children's participation in classroom talk.

Our earlier studies have shown that children start out as individuals who speak out, or not, based on their own individual experiences and proclivities. However, once school norms for school talk have been acquired, we found that gender becomes a factor. Gender matters in whether or not children gain the floor, in the duration of their floor time, and in the interest shown to them by their teacher for their floor-time contributions. The data for this part of the talk come from a year-long ethnographic study of ten preschool classrooms in the greater Los Angeles area. The children and staff represent many languages and cultures. In eight of the classrooms, the children, staff, and aides are primarily Latino and bilingual in English and Spanish. But the children in all of the classrooms represent other cultural groups as well, including Samoan-American, Filipino-American, and East Indian-American, African-American, and European-American children. Other cultural groups represented among the teachers, aides, and site directors include Samoan-American, Filipina-American, African-American, Israeli, and Japanese-American, and one European-American teacher. All of the teachers are female. The talk will use the two communities of practice to address the issue of when and how gender language matters to its community of users, and to explore why it is eradicated in one situation, but maintained in another.