Differently Literate

Boys, Girls and the Schooling of Literacy

Elaine Millard, Dr Elaine Millard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135713874
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Presents research into the differences in boy's and girl's experiences of the reading and writing curriculum at home and in school. The book is presented in three sections: an outline of the theoretical debates on gender difference and academic achievement; a description of the research into these issues conducted by the author; and an analysis of the author's findings. In discussing the outcome of her research, the author aims to highlight further areas for more detailed study and makes recommendations for the development of literacy policies, which cross curriculum boundaries in schools.

Section 1: Considering Gender and Literacy Research

Chapter 1: The Influence of Gender on Schooling

WAR

A group of eight-year-olds

follow me into a room.

Three boys, three girls.

‘Let’s move the table.’ I say.

We all move the table.

‘Who’s going behind the table?’ I say.

‘Me,’ says one boy—

‘Get away from the girls,’ he says.

After eight years alive in this world

we have taught him to be at war

with half the people in the world

Michael Rosen

Gender and Early Schooling

From the beginning of the social interaction that comes with full-time schooling, girls and boys in the same classroom have been shown to create quite different educational experiences for themselves (Arnot and Weiner, 1987; Walkerdine, 1989; Delamont, 1990). Research data reported in the past twenty years have shown that boys occasion more discipline problems for their teachers (Clarricoates, 1978; Brophy 1985; Swann and Graddol, 1988) and that attempts by teachers to give girls an equal share of classroom attention are actively opposed by boys (Goodenough, 1987; D’Arcy, 1991; Jordan, 1995). In mixed group settings, for example, it has been shown that boys claim more teacher time, even when teachers are making a conscious effort to be even-handed (Clarricoates, 1978). Boys learn at an early age to control both the girls in their class and the women who teach them by adopting a ‘male’ discourse which emphasizes negative aspects of female sexuality, and embodies ‘direct sexual insult’. This has been characterized by researchers as ‘slagging off’ (Lees, 1986; Walkerdine, 1981). Boys act as if the very fact of working with girls will demean them. For example, D’Arcy (1991) has described how a boy in primary school, who had been asked to share a table with a girl, pushed her things away with a ruler so as not to be in contact even with her belongings and then refused to sit on a chair previously occupied by other girls in the class.

Children bring the knowledge that they are differently gendered, along with the need to display their difference in particular ways, into the earliest stage of schooling. What constitutes sex role appropriate behaviour is confirmed by, and negotiated through their interaction with other children. Paley (1984) begins an account of a year of life in her kindergarten classroom by emphasizing the differences she observed:

Kindergarten is a triumph of sexual self-stereotyping. No amount of adult subterfuge or propaganda deflects the five year old’s passion for segregation by sex. They think they have invented the differences between boys and girls and, as with any new invention, must prove that it works, (p. ix)

Later she recounts a typical story told to the class by a boy:

We sneaked up in the house. Then we put the good guys in jail. Then we killed some of the good guys. Then the four bad guys got some money and some jewels.

And juxtaposes to it this one told by a girl:

Once there were four kittens and they found a pretty bunny. Then they went to buy the bunny some food and they fed the baby bunny and then they went on a picnic.

She comments:

Every year the girls begin with stories of good little families while the boys bring us a litany of super heroes and bad guys. Language development and creative dramatics may be on my mind but the children take over the story-plays for a more urgent matter: to inform one another of the preferred images for boys and girls, (p. 3)

The differences in the story themes chosen vividly illustrate both boys’ and girls’ use of story telling as an element of contrasting gender display. Jordan (1995) has described boys’ cooperative fantasy play as re-enactments of ‘“warrior” discourse a discourse that informs epic narratives in a tradition stretching from Hercules and Beowulf to Superman and Dirty Harry’ (p. 76). These plays, she suggests, are used to determine the hero roles available to boys, while creating a further masculine identity which is designated ‘not female’ (ibid.).

Primary teachers in England have also reported significant differences in boys’ and girls’ reading interests, often citing this as one of the major factors in boys’ weaker all-round performance in the literacy curriculum (Osmont, 1987; Pidgeon, 1993). Osmont reports that children brought to the classroom their perceptions of what adults at home were reading describing considerable differences between men’s and women’s reading matter. She reports that a majority of mothers were observed reading mainly fiction, whereas fathers read newspapers, information books and documents brought back from work (Osmont, 1987 p. 160).

Pidgeon (1993), reflecting on the gendered responses of her 5–7-year-old readers, was prompted to ask herself why the books that she had shared with equal pleasure with boys and girls only a short while before, suddenly became marked as more appropriate to the interests of one particular gender. She asks specifically:

We know that by the age of seven, marked differences between girls’ and boys’ reading abilities and reading preferences can be identified. These differences are perpetuated and become more obvious throughout school and into adulthood. How do these differences emerge and why? Can it be that right from the beginning of children’s reading experiences, they are linking these experiences with what they know about gender?’ (1993, p. 21)

Later she argues that at five, just when the majority of infants are learning to read, gender role becomes increasingly important. Further she suggests that a gender-related study of children’s reading behaviour at home reveals their understanding of marked differences in their parents’ habits of reading (1993, pp. 30–2).

Minns (1993) has also described differences in orientation towards the use of texts in her account of three 10-year-old boys and their reading. Boys, she demonstrates, not only read different texts but they read shared books differently. In particular she records how one boy, Clayton, chooses to read the same journals as his father, who is a farmer. Later, discussing his rather factual response to a well-loved reader, Charlotte’s Web, where he has expressed a special interest in the life cycle of the spider, Minns suggests that this is a newly acquired defensive gesture:

It is as if Clayton is transforming what could be a totally aesthetic experience into a factual exchange of data, and making them a part of his theory of how the world works.

Clayton’s sense of himself as a reader appears to be related to his own developing masculine identity. Two things are of key importance to him: his father and the world of farming. They are the pivot on which his life turns, and, although he demonstrates a sensitive response to fiction, at the same time he feels pressured to construct a stereotyped masculine role in his public response, often on his guard against certain ways of reading. (1993, p. 65)

She concludes that Clayton has adopted a view of reading from his father which is concerned about ‘finding out’ (in this instance, about the behaviour of spiders) so that he treats Charlotte’s Web as he would a natural history text. Despite a school environment that values and fosters an interest in the reading of stories, his individual reading interests at the end of his primary education are turning away from fiction, to the kinds of information books that he identifies with his future adult role, a fact Minns obviously regrets. Hers is a concern that I have encountered in large numbers of teachers of this age group. They experience the change in boys’ reading habits as a kind of denial of their own values and interests. Mothers similarly find the change in their sons’ reading unsympathetic and attempt to win them back to the old ground.

It is not only in the choice of reading matter and ways of reading it in which boys differ markedly from girls. The whole area of reading for leisure holds less interest for them throughout schooling. In a range of English-speaking countries, larger surveys and cross-cultural studies confirm the data provided by case studies of individual readers. Gender differences in the primary school are reflected not only in differences in book choice, but also in the amount of time and enthusiasm given to reading (APU, 1987). Moreover, particularly in the United States, research has found that reading is increasingly seen by pupils as an activity more appropriate to girls than boys as they progress through schooling (Wallbrown, Levine and Engin, 1981; Kelly, 1986; Shapiro, 1990). Although earlier cross-cultural studies found this trend to be more noticeable in the United States (Downing, May and Ollila, 1982), later studies have shown that differences in attitudes to reading are now widespread in Britain (Davies and Brember, 1993; Millard, 1994; Benton, 1995); Australia (Patterson, 1986) and New Zealand (Bardsley, 1991). Parents and librarians, as well as teachers, have reported a growing disinterest in boys for the reading that is expected of them both at home and in school (Wheeler, 1984; Nicolle, 1989).

Where the uses and gratification that pupils take from their reading have been considered, boys have been found to be more likely to read for utilitarian purposes; girls for their own intrinsic pleasures (Clark, 1976; Wheeler, 1984; Greaney and Neumann, 1983). Clark’s classic study, Young Fluent Readers (1976), showed that even at the pre-school stage there were noticeable differences in the reading materials chosen by boys and girls:

The children read a variety of print…sports news and television programmes were two of the sources of interest in the newspapers to the boys in particular. The girls tended to be interested in reading for themselves stories they had already heard, or stories of a similar level. The boys on the contrary…were inclined to show interest in the print in their environment and use their reading skill to extend their knowledge, (p. 49)

Clark’s study also highlighted the different induction of boys and girls into the world of print. Children kept records of their reading in diaries, and her analysis of these records showed significant differences. Particularly noticeable in boys’ accounts were the inclusion of daily papers, comics, annuals and collections of stories, whereas the girls’ records featured fairy tales, Enid Blyton mystery stories and books on horses, ballet and wild flowers. Clark further suggests that the girls were more content with the kind of work they were given to do in school than were the boys in her study (1976, p. 86). Boys therefore, experienced a dissonance between the literacy they practised skilfully at home and that demanded from them by teachers.

Content Difference in Reading Choice

More recent studies of reading attitudes in English primary schools have concluded that the major difference in reading attitudes for Year 2, Year 4, and Year 6 children is similarly located in the content of what was read rather than in a lack of interest in reading itself (Davies and Brember, 1993; Stables et al., 1995). It has also been repeatedly recorded that gender differences in reading interests widen as pupils progress through school. An Australian survey of 194 16-year-old students found that 41.6 per cent of the boys chose not to read fiction, as compared with 19.3 per cent of the girls and that there were wide differences in the kinds of genre chosen by the sexes, with girls of all abilities reading large numbers of romance titles (Patterson, 1986, p. 46). In a comparative study of readers in England and the United States, Fisher and Ayres (1990) found significant differences in the reading choices of boys and girls.

Individual studies also highlight gender bias in choice of texts. Bissex (1980) who documented the reading and writing history of her son Paul from the ages of 5 to 11, characterized his reading interests as a liking for: ‘science fiction, adventure stories, humorous stories, and informational books with an emphasis on remarkable facts and scientific kinds of information’ (p. 168). Although Bissex reported that Paul was able to follow his own interests widely at home, she found, as with the boys in Clark’s (1976) study, that this was not the case for his work at school. Such evidence suggests that there is less provision for boys to exercise their reading interests within the school environment than those that are seen as appropriate by girls.

The differences in reading choice is also mirrored in the way that the two genders report responding to the reading they choose. In the reading of novels, for example, Brownstein (1982) has argued that although boys and men often fantasize about the narratives they read, it is largely girls and women who tend to ‘live longer in them’ (p. xv). She discusses what it means for a woman to search for the significance of her life by reading stories about women who are doing just that:

The marriage plot most novels depend on is about finding validation for one’s uniqueness and importance by being singled out among all other women by a man…For a heroine is just that, an image; novel heroines, like novel readers, are often women who want to become heroines, (p. xvi)

A student teacher, writing an account of her own reading development as part of an autobiographical reflection on learning for a teacher training course, described the quest to become the heroine as motivating her own adolescent reading:

As a young girl I would search out books which dealt with women often set apart from the rest of society. I would imagine myself in their situation and almost come to believe I was a heroine, for I was able to understand, empathise and appreciate their dilemmas, their distress and their internal dialogue. It is perhaps why Jane Eyre remains one of my favourite books.

In comparison, a male student, on the same course, offered a quite different account of the development of his interest in the subject:

It was definitely the writing element I enjoyed most in English. Looking back I can see that my reading was not as involved. Some of my early writing is typified by petty authorial intervention (so unnecessary), more often than not to make sure that ‘Miss’ did not miss the joke…

I was probably responding to the sort of literature I was influenced by outside school. At the age of 14 I loved Terry Pratchett’s Disc World which lead me to value literature on the basis of how funny I found it.

The contrasts of interest are sharp and the gendered differences expressed here have been found as often in the accounts of postgraduate students training to teach English as they are found in the reading and writing preferences collected from pupils which form the subject matter of later chapters.

Large Scale Surveys of Reading Interests

That the trend away from voluntary reading was most acute amongst adolescent boys was signalled twenty years ago. The Bullock Report (DES, 1975) drew on the first report of the School Council Project, directed by Whitehead, Capey and Maddren (1975) which identified a strong tendency for older boys to display a preference for factual books. Furthermore, Department Education and Science (DES) research at that time indicated that one-third of 14-year-old boys of average intelligence read nothing at all for pleasure. Subsequent surveys have reproduced the findings of Whitehead’s team, which show that there is a steep falling away of interest in reading at adolescence and that this is particularly marked in boys. This decline is also documented in the reports of the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) produced between 1979–83, which consistently show boys to be at a disadvantage in the literacy curriculum. Comparable results to those of Whitehead, Maddren and Capey have also been reported recently by Peter Benton, whose 1995 survey, using a similar questionnaire to Whitehead’s team, showed that a third of boys aged 13+ chose not to read at all for pleasure (Benton, 1995, p. 102). The Ofsted Report, Boys and English (1993), using evidence drawn from the inspections of secondary schools and following the introduction of the National Curriculum (1989–92), gives a current national perspective. The opening statement is unequivocal:

Boys do not do as well as girls in English in schools. There are contrasts in performance and in attitudes towards the subject. The majority of pupils who experience difficulty in learning to read and write are boys. Boys’ results in public examinations at 16 are not as good as girls’, and many more girls than boys continue to study English beyond 16. (Ofsted, 1993, p. 2)

It further reported that:

In all year groups girls read more fiction books than boys and tended to have different tastes in reading. Few teachers monitored differences in boys’ and girls’ reading differences, (ibid.)

One major cause of this difference may be the way reading is presented in schools. At an age where teachers want pupils to begin to progress from children’s stories towards fiction for older and adult readers, a large number of pupils stop reading altogether. Many of those who do continue to read for pleasure move into a gender-related selection from the best seller shelves: girls choosing horror and popular romances, boys opting for action and science fiction. Further, many boys read as little in school as they are allowed to get away with.

Gender Differences in Writing

The picture is much the same in writing. In large scale studies, girls have been shown to be more enthusiastic about their writing from the outset of their schooling. The APU surveys carried out between 1979–83 found that a greater number of boys agreed with the statement ‘I hate writing’ with more girls endorsing ‘I like writing’ (Gorman, White, Brooks, Maclure and Aspel, 1988, pp. 176–7). At 16+ more girls opt to study English as an ‘A’ level subject and express an interest in careers that have writing as a central activity (Gorman, White and Brooks, 1987, p. 58). Many more girls were also found to have engaged in writing activities before they started school. A tour around any toy shop, or early learning centre, is sufficient to confirm that desks, toy briefcases, and much of the paraphernalia associated with writing, are targeted at girls rather than boys. Boys are directed by illustrations on the packaging to construction and action toys: and this, despite more than two decades of international campaigning for equality of treatment.

Girls’ enthusiasm for writing activity is illustrated in the work of Steedman (1982) who documented three working-class girls’ extended story writing in the primary school. She ends her detailed study of the texts they produced with a discussion of ‘sex and stories’, in which she comments:

Every instinct possessed by those who grew up in the culture that produced the Tidy House insists that it must have been written by little girls and that it could never have been written by little boys. In the classroom where Lindie, Melissa and Carla worked, little boys did write, certainly not with the alacrity displayed by the girls, but sometimes at great length, frequently producing episodic, epic adventures with lone male heroes moving through time and space. As a group, the boys in this particular classroom (and in many others) demonstrated far less competence in reading and writing than did the girls. Several of them were only just beginning to read at the age of eight and did not have the means to produce extended pieces of writing. (1982, p. 135)

Steedman echoes other primary teachers’ recognition that early differences in boys’ and girls’ attainment is related to classroom choices. Girls often choose to ‘do literacy activities’;...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Considering Gender and Literacy Research
• Section 2: The Research Evidence
• Section 3: Analysis and Recommendations
• Appendix A: Examples of Unstructured Stories of Reading Transcribed from Children’s Work Collected in the Pilot Study
• Appendix B: Examples of Story Openings Collected in the Second Phase of the Study and Analysed in Chapter 6
• Appendix C: Titles of Books Recorded in the Questionnaires as Well Liked
• References