An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

3.6 Boys and girls
A somewhat similar interest in sex differences (particularly in the earlier years)
requires applied linguists to study language achievement by boys and girls – by
language achievement here is meant second/foreign-language learning as well as
schooled literacy in the mother tongue or L1, by which here we mean the school
language, understood as the medium of instruction in all areas of the school work.
Just as in the studies mentioned above, the common finding here is that females are
ahead: girls do better than boys in all verbal areas of the school. The explanation
typically offered is that girls are more verbal than boys, that this is hard-wired into
the brain: indeed it is curious that the ubiquity of this explanation for what goes on
in schools does not reach over into those other areas of male–female differences. I
suggested that there was really no need for an explanation – that noting the differ -
ence was enough, but even so it is surprising that the explanation of achievement
differences, the view that females are more verbal is not used to explain why females
are more advanced in language change. 
Applied linguists have certainly taken a keen interest in this school difference
between boys and girls: and it must be stressed (and it is worth doing so because it
acts as a distinguisher of the interest between linguists and applied linguists) that
their reason for that interest is not that they are primarily interested in the language
of boys and girls but that they are interested in how boys and girls use language so
that they can take action to improve the teaching and learning of both groups or to
facilitate intercommunication between boys and girls.
3.7 Language in gender
We have used the word ‘manipulable’ in relation to the acting on language attitudes
in order to try to change them and we have suggested that this intervention goes to
the heart of the applied linguist’s interest in language and gender. While the linguist
is, as we have seen, concerned with the role of gender in language, the ways in which
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gender (or indeed sex) affects both language structure and language use, the applied
linguist’s professional role as interventionist means that he or she is concerned with
the language–gender relationship the other way round, with language in gender,
paralleling the impact of language on society.
What impact does language have on gender? The most obvious answer is that it
promotes and, above all perhaps, enshrines unequal power relations, including of
course negative stereotyping of women. It should be pointed out that making such a
direct causal link, when all that we can be sure of is that there is a correlation between
language and power, is disputed. It is further disputed that changing the language
will necessarily change the power imbalance. Language, it may be argued, is merely
the messenger not the message. Nevertheless, there is recognition that being pol -
itically correct, which is what wishing to change the language of gender has been
mocked for being, has the merit of compelling awareness of the power imbalance
which the inertia of a fixed power relationship, enshrined in a fossilised terminology,
hides from us all. The rationale is similar to that of exploring language attitudes with
a view to changing them, a view which takes for granted that attitudes are malleable
and can be changed so as to promote good intergroup relations. Similarly, while
power in itself is notoriously hard currency, language can be changed through
engineering: such change may do no more than create a temporary awareness of the
inequalities, but it may possibly do more and help ameliorate them. Whether or not
this is true, considerable effort has in recent years been directed at attempting to
make the language more equal with the intention of redressing the gender–power
relation.