The role of gender in the Greek EFL classroom: Should gender fair/neutral language be explicitly taught to Greek adolescent students?

University of Nottingham

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION3

Reason for choosing the topic3

Organization of the paper4

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW5

Grammatical Gender and Language in Greek6

Gender differences7

Gender and sound8

CHAPTER 3: APPLICATION & DISCUSSION11

Critique on gender-language13

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION15

References17

The role of gender in the Greek EFL classroom: Should gender fair/neutral language be explicitly taught to Greek adolescent students?

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Historically speaking, Greece has long been exposed to international interactions and global influences. Since the 13th century, the country has welcomed foreign visitors for various purposes including trade, commerce, and dignitary and diplomatic missions from China, Japan, Persia, Holland, France, England, Arabia, and India. For this reason, global influences are not a new phenomenon for Greece. In fact, global influences, especially during the aggressive movement of colonial power in the late 19th century have compelled Greece to reform to be in par with the “progress” and “civilization” expected by the Western imperial power. The reform of the country in various areas, including the abolishment of slavery and the development and spreading of mass education in Greece, was deemed necessary. Based on historical records, these steps toward modernization lead by Greek kings during the colonization period were one of the main factors that have helped and continue to maintain independence and prevent the country from being colonized by European powers (Lazaraton, 2006); (Norton, 2005).

Reason for choosing the topic

The current study conducts research on the topic of the role of gender in the Greek EFL classroom. It studies if teh gender fair/neutral language should be explicitly taught to Greek adolescent students or not. The primary reason for choosing this topic is to study the beliefs of teachers which have been a focus of many studies in education; however, despite its long history, there does not seem to be a consensus regarding how beliefs can be defined, causing difficulty in studying them. One reason may be that beliefs cannot easily be amenable to empirical investigation, which often leads beliefs to be regarded as a proper topic for other disciplines, such as philosophy and religion. Therefore, educational researchers have no choice but to resort to teachers' stated beliefs expressed in such ways as interviews and questionnaires. It is important to acknowledge that beliefs and stated beliefs may not always match because teachers may hold some beliefs unconsciously or they do not want to express some of their beliefs, which are not congruent to external norm, such as from society, their current teaching paradigm and even the interviewers, whose norms interviewees tend to follow when they express their beliefs. Even teachers without any previous experience of teaching are neither “blank/ clean slates”.

Two child development theories of significance

Even though Piaget's theory is widely appreciated and used as a benchmark by most theories for child development, Vygotsky's theory about child development is more useful for teachers and parents as they focus on the involvement of parents, peers and teachers in the learning and growth of a ...