Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

This past Friday, Professor Steve Walsh from the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University presented at an ELT research seminar facilitated by CULI at Chulalongkorn University. Professor Walsh introduced "Sociocultural theory” as an emerging theory in both Psychology and Applied Linguistics that focuses on the contributions that both culture and society make on individual development.

He stated that the Applied Linguistics side focuses on studying the development of language within a society by viewing language development as mainly a social process, and by stressing the interaction between developing people and the influence on their language development from the culture in which they live.

It just so happens that I was recently asked to present about “culturally influenced gender-based learning in ELT” at a traditionally conservative Islamic conference. Upon preliminary readings, I found that this topic might be somewhat touchy in certain conservative religious circles.

My plan of approach, therefore, focuses on English as an adaptable language taken from the concept of World Englishes (thank you, Heath Rose). I am also focusing on World English speakers instead of on NES vs. NNES or even Male vs. Female, and culture and society from a global viewpoint.

My more conservative Muslim ELT teacher friends strongly suggested that I avoid the mention of “other” genders and even the concept that men and women may be “equal” in some way. I know that I am using too many quotation marks in the previous sentence, but I want to show that the words were emphasized.

Although I feel I may have a reasonably safe plan, I would love for you guys to offer some suggestions on how to best utilize the concept of “Sociocultural Theory” to safely approach the topic of “culturally influenced gender-based learning in ELT.”

I'm not very up on gender as a learning variable, but I do know that there's been research that shows it influences motivation and use of metacognitive strategies, and that multiple-choice tests have a gender bias in favour of males (potential research topic: do male-dominated societies tend to use more multiple-choice items on national exams as a hidden way of reinforcing male domination?)

2 issues concern me about this area:
1. Is there more in-group variation than between-group variation? In other words, do males differ from each other more than they differ from females as a group (and the same for females)? While humans love categorising, a lot of categories we use may not be particularly useful.
2. Is there an issue of self-fulfilling prophecies for gender and language learning? Most of the research in this area has focused on race (if teacher unconsciously believe that, say, Hispanics are poor learners, this will be transmitted to the Hispanic learners who will do badly because they are expected to), but there has been research on gender expectations and the learning of science (since society in general believes that females are arty and males sciency, these become expectations that subconsciously influence learning).

Oh, Great One..... Thank you for your sole reply ....

After days of pondering your words, I have decided to focus my presentation on overall Individual Differences in English Language Teaching instead of only focusing on culture and gender. This seems to, considering I will be presenting in a conservative religious society, be a safer avenue that only focusing on culture and gender.