Classrooms provide lessons not only in subject content but also in socially approved forms of academic discourse. Moreover, they may function to reproduce normative social values, attitudes and beliefs. This paper focuses on the reproduction of and resistance to traditional gender roles in the classroom discourse of university students. By some measures (turn and word counts), women appear to have achieved an equal access to the public floor in these academic exchanges, yet a closer examination of the content and contexts of their discourse reveals complex struggles for control of the conversational floor. Women's control may be contested by task-divergent behaviors (such as derisive asides) that uphold the status quo in which men control public space, yet women may also enact divergent but essentially task-continuative behaviors that contest prevailing, restrictive norms by restructuring discourse to exercise other choices. Critical discourse analysts may play an important role in challenging the passive reproduction of repressive practices, by analyzing and promoting the liberatory discourse choices that arise from non-elites who resist the status quo in their conversation.
Arnot, Madeleine (1982) `Male Hegemony, Social Class, and Women's Education', Journal of Education164(1): 64-89.
2.
Bergvall, Victoria L. (1995) `Joining in Academic Conversation: Gender, Power, and the Apportionment of Turns at Talk', Studies in the Linguistic Sciences25(2): 105-129.
3.
Bergvall, Victoria L. (in press) `Constructing and Enacting Gender Through Discourse: Negotiating Multiple Roles as Female Engineering Students', in Victoria L. Bergvall, Janet M. Bing and Alice F. Freed (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, pp. 173-201. London: Longman.
4.
Bergvall, Victoria L. , Sorby, Sheryl A. and Worthen, James B. (1994) `Thawing the Freezing Climate for Women in Engineering Education: Views from Both Sides of the Desk', Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering1(4): 323-346.
5.
Bernstein, Basil (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: Class, Codes and Control, Vol. VI. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
6.
Bing, Janet M. and Bergvall, Victoria L. (in press) `The Question of Questions: Beyond Binary Thinking', in Victoria L. Bergvall, Janet M. Bing and Alice F. Freed (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice, pp. 1-30. London: Longman.
7.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd edn, trans. R. Nice. London: Sage.
8.
Cameron, Deborah and Coates, Jennifer (1989) `Some Problems in the Sociolinguistic Explanation of Sex Differences', in Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron (eds) Women in Their Speech Communities, pp. 13-26. New York: Longman.
9.
Cameron, Deborah , Frazer, Elizabeth, Harvey, Penelope, Rampton, M.B.H. and Richardson, Kay (1992) Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method. New York: Routledge.
10.
Cazden, Courtney (1986) `Classroom Discourse', in Merlin C. Wittrock (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edn, pp. 432-463. New York: Macmillan.
11.
Cheshire, Jenny and Jenkins, Nancy (1991) `Gender Issues in the GCSE Oral English Examination: Part II', Language and Education5(1): 19-40.
12.
Christie, Frances (1995) `Pedagogic Discourse in the Primary School', Linguistics and Education7: 221-242.
13.
Connell, Robert W. (1987) Gender and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
14.
Edelsky, Carole (1981) `Who's Got the Floor?'Language in Society10: 383-421.
15.
Fishman, Pamela M. (1983) `Interaction: The Work Women Do', in Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae and Nancy Henley (eds) Language, Gender, and Society, pp. 89-102. Rowley, MA: Newbury.
16.
Florman, Samuel (1987) The Civilized Engineer. New York: St Martin's.
17.
Foley, Douglas (1990) Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
18.
Fredrich, Augustine J. , ed. (1989) Sons of Martha: Civil Engineering Readings in Modern Literature. New York: American Society of Civil Engineers.
19.
Freire, Paolo (1983) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
20.
Gamoran, Adam and Nystrand, Martin (1992) `Taking Students Seriously', in Frederick Newman (ed.) Student Engagement and Achievement in American High Schools, pp. 40-61. New York: Teacher's College Press.
21.
Hacker, Sally (1989) Pleasure, Power, and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace. Boston MA: Unwin Hyman.
22.
Hall, Roberta and Sandler, Bernice (1982) The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women?Washington, DC: Project on the Status and Education of Women, The Association of American Colleges.
23.
Hodge, Robert and Kress, Gunther (1993) Language as Ideology, 2nd edn.London: Routledge.
24.
Holland, Dorothy C. and Eisenhart, Margaret A. (1990) Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
25.
Holmes, Janet (1992) `Women's Talk in Public Contexts', Discourse & Society3(2): 132-150.
26.
Jenkins, Nancy and Cheshire, Jenny (1990) `Gender Issues in the GCSE Oral English Examination: Part I', Language and Education4(4): 261-292.
27.
Jespersen, Otto (1922) `The Woman', in Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origins, pp. 237-254. London: Allen & Unwin.
28.
Kelly, Gail and Nihlen, Ann (1982) `Schooling and the Reproduction of Patriarchy: Unequal Workloads, Unequal Rewards', in Michael Apple (ed.) Cultural and Economic Reproduction in American Education: Essays in Class, Ideology, and the State, pp. 162-180. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
29.
Kramarae, Cheris and Treichler, Paula (1990) `Power Relationships in the Classroom', in Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson (eds) Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy, pp. 41-59. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
McHoul, Andrew (1978) `The Organization of Turns at Formal Talk in the Classroom', Language in Society7: 183-213.
32.
McIlwee, Judith S. and Robinson, J. Gregg (1992) Women in Engineering: Gender, Power, and Workplace Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
33.
Maltz, Daniel A. and Borker, Ruth (1982) `A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication', in John J. Gumperz (ed.) Language and Social Identity, pp. 196-216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Mehan, Hugh (1985) `The Structure of Classroom Discourse', in Teun van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 3: Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 119-131. San Diego, CA: Academic.
35.
National Science Foundation (1990) Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. Report 90-301. January.
36.
Nystrand, Martin and Gamoran, Adam (1991) `Instructional Discourse, Student Engagement, and Literature', Research on the Teaching of English25: 261-290.
37.
Nystrand, Martin and Gamoran, Adam (1992) `Student Engagement: When Recitation Becomes Conversation', in Hersholt Waxman and Herbert Walberg (eds) Contemporary Research on Teaching, pp. 257-276. Berkeley CA: McCutchan.
38.
Remlinger, Kathryn (1995) `Production, Resistance, and Opposition: Students Linguistically Constituting Ideologies of Gender and Sexuality', Unpublished PhD thesis, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI.
39.
Sadker, Myra and Sadker, David (1990) `Confronting Sexism in the College Classroom', in Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson (eds) Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pedagogy, pp. 176-187. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
40.
Sadker, Myra and Sadker, David (1994) Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
41.
Sarah, Elizabeth (1980) `Teachers and Students in the Classroom: An Examination of Classroom Interaction', in Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah (eds) Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, pp. 155-164. London: The Women's Press.
42.
Savage, Gerald (1994) `Inventing Disciplinary Knowledge and Ethos: Conversational Argument as Heuristic Inquiry in Collaborative Groups of Chemical Engineering Students', Unpublished PhD thesis, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI.
43.
Scollon, Ron (1985) `The Machine Stops: Silence in the Metaphor of Malfunction', in Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike (eds) Perspectives on Silence, pp. 21-33. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
44.
Scollon, Ron and Scollon, Suzanne B.K. (1983) `Face in Interethnic Communication', in Jack Richards and Richard Schmidt (eds) Language and Communication, pp. 156-186. London: Longman.
45.
Spender, Dale (1980a) `Disappearing Tricks', in Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah (eds) Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, pp. 165-173. London: The Women's Press.
46.
Spender, Dale (1980b) `Talking in Class', in Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah (eds) Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, pp. 148-154. London: The Women's Press.
47.
Spender, Dale (1985) Man Made Language, 2nd edn.Boston MA: Routledge.
48.
Spender, Dale (1992) `The Entry of Women into the Education of Men', in Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender (eds) The Knowledge Explosion: Generations of Feminist Scholarship, pp. 235-253. New York: Teacher's College Press.
49.
Stubbs, Michael (1983) Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
50.
Swann, Joan (1989) `Talk Control: An Illustration from the Classroom of Problems in Analyzing Male Dominance of Conversation', in Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron (eds) Women in Their Speech Communities, pp. 122-140. New York: Longman.
51.
Swann, Joan (1992) Girls, Boys, and Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
52.
Tannen, Deborah (1981) `Indirectness in Discourse: Ethnicity as Conversational Style', Discourse Processes4(3): 221-238.
Woods, Nicola (1989) `Talking Shop: Sex and Status as Determinants of Floor Apportionment in a Work Setting', in Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron (eds) Women in Their Speech Communities, pp. 141-157. New York: Longman.
