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are required to reconfigure their relationship to the social world
(2004:5), arguing that any analysis of individual language learners must
involve analysis of this social space . The boys who talk through our
data are unmistakably individual boys, voicing and performing them-
selves from individual speaking positions; but they are also indisputably
socially situated individual boys, contextually located and impacted
upon by intersecting social influences. The concept of communities of
practice may be relevant here: what Lave and Wenger define as a set of
relations among persons, activity and world temporarily situated and
socially constituted (1991:98). The boys who speak through the follow-
ing chapters narrate their thoughts about languages and language learn-
ing, about themselves as boys and as language learners, from within
particular communities of practice which are constituted via particular
discursive resources. Lave and Wagner argue that the relations estab-
lished in these communities of practice often have more influence on
learning outcomes than does whatever is happening in terms of
methodology or instruction: The practice of the community creates the
The Gendering of Languages Education 35
potential curriculum in the broadest sense . . . . (ibid:92 3). This
proposition will be revisited later in the book, when we reflect on the
evidence gathered and presented in terms of the theoretical frame
presented in this chapter.
The trouble boys are in
Returning to the context which frames the boys languages relationship,
it is probably helpful at this point to go back one step and look more
closely at the nature of the trouble that boys are supposedly in. We
already noted that the main locus of concern is literacy. Research data
indicate that there are established patterns of differentiated perform-
ance between male and female students in terms of literacy proficiency
in both Australia and the United Kingdom (Gilbert and Gilbert, 1998;
Martino, 1995). Girls are reported to consistently out-perform boys in
early basic literacy skills tests and in final year secondary English scores.
The 1996 National School English Literacy Survey, for example, under-
taken by the Australian Council of Educational Research, found that in
reading, 34 per cent of boys in Years 3 and 5 did not meet national stand-
ards compared with 23 per cent of girls, while in writing tasks, 35 per cent
of the boys in Year 3 did not meet national standards compared with 19
per cent of girls; and in Year 5 testing, 41 per cent of the boys compared
with 26 per cent of girls did not meet the standards (Gilbert and Gilbert,
1998:19). Similar statistics are available from UK-based research (e.g.,
Epstein, Elwood, Hey and Maw, 1998), and this evidence is widely circu-
lated and used as the basis for much of the framing of current interven-
tionist policy.
The evidence is increasingly challenged, however, both for its reliabil-
ity and usefulness (Raphael Reed, 1999). More finely grained analyses
show that factors other than gender clearly impact upon these statistics,
and that the current panic around boys and literacy represents a simplis-
tic, uncritical reading of a complex intersection of variables. Australian
studies demonstrate how a single-variable analysis provides an unreliable
account of a complex scenario. Research in New South Wales almost a
decade ago already demonstrated how socioeconomic factors play a sig-
nificant part in determining educational outcomes, as do other variables
such as geographical location and ethnicity. Gender, it was argued, is
never a free-standing variable. This research indicated that not all girls
are performing well in school, or are out-performing boys; and that not
all boys are underachieving (Davy, 1995). In Queensland, more recently,
Lingard and Douglas (1999) suggest that closer analysis of the under-
achieving boys suggests that the outcomes being read to increasingly
36 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
alarmist effect are less to do with poor performance by boys in specific
areas and more to do with improved performance by girls in traditionally
masculine curriculum areas. Like the earlier Australian study, this study
foregrounds the interrelatedness of social class and school achievement
along gender lines:
A small group of mainly middle-class girls are now performing as well
as, and thus challenging the dominance of middle-class boys in the
high status masculinist subjects such as Maths, Chemistry and to a
lesser extent Physics.
(Ibid:278)
Recent studies in Canada (Davison et al., 2004), have also queried the
reliability of the crisis account. Studies in Nova Scotia show that girls
reading and writing scores are higher than boys in some measurements,
but data collected in 1998 indicate that boys across the board are not in
fact falling further behind girls: In fact, in numerous cases, males are
showing improvement at several levels, and some boys are doing very well
(ibid:55). Like researchers in the United Kingdom, the Canadian team
point out that differences in literacy performance have in fact been an
object of concern for over 300 years (Cohen, 1998). Griffin, analysing the
boys underachievement debate in the United Kingdom, argues that the
failing boys narrative represents a form of collective and selective forget-
ting , which totally ignores previous debates about the underachieve-
ment of working-class boys in poorly resourced schools, about girls
relative underachievement in maths and sciences, and about underper-
formance among particular ethnic community groups (2000:167). The
hugely significant intersections between gender, social class and ethni-
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