Constructions of masculinities and femininities in EFL students’ written texts from a critical literacy perspective

Abstract

This classroom discourse analysis intended to identify how masculine and feminine constructions were built and revealed in EFL students’ critical literacy processes in a ninth-grade with forty-two students at a public school from Bogotá, Colombia. The study was aimed at developing students’ awareness of their daily gendered social relationships by means of critical literacy activities applied in four-hour sessions per week during three months in a cooperative learning environment. Students’ artifacts, field notes (based on video class recordings), voice recordings and their transcriptions, and qualitative interviews were the instruments for data gathering. The analysis of the data was done using elements of the grounded theory from a poststructuralist paradigm. It was found that boys and girls revealed and constructed their masculinities and their femininities in terms of gendered ideologies. It was also found that boys and girls could develop a critical position of these social gendered ideologies and hence they can diminish their effect in the politics of the classroom.