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the importance of utilising what she referred to as radical work found
in local spaces . The major recommendation therefore, in terms of
Changing Thinking, Transforming Action 201
pedagogy, is not for teachers or students directly, but for those who have
responsibility for developing, resourcing and managing language pro-
grammes and for supporting teachers work: that they talk to teachers
and students, listen to them and think about what they say and what
they do, understand what is needed and deliver the required support;
that they combine the radical work from local spaces with the ongoing
development of the professional knowledge base. This is the kind of
reciprocal action that s required for individual teachers to make the
kinds of changes in practice that are needed. Language programmes
need to be not only more attractive to prospective students, they also
need to be more effective in terms of what they deliver. We collectively
know a great deal more than we did about what constitutes effective for-
eign language teaching and learning and our data show that students
also have a good idea of what this might look like. As conditions change,
knowledge changes; but at this point we know enough to do better than
we re ordinarily doing. While many conversations focus on teaching
better for boys , this should be a purely strategic, short-term response to
the most visible problem . The reality is that we should be teaching bet-
ter for all learners. Rather than thinking about pedagogical affirmative
action for half the student population, we should be thinking about
improved practice across the board.
The inner boys languages frame: boy-friendly pedagogy?
Which brings us back to the final frame of this project, the boys
languages relationship itself. We came into this study wanting to find out
more about what we recognised as a poor relationship; hoping to help
improve it. We found several interrelated issues: what kinds of boys
come to the language classroom; what kinds of learning experiences are
offered to them; what kinds of cultural environment frame their experi-
ence. We have talked about the implications of what we found: the con-
straints which frame normative performances of gender; the tensions
which result when theory and practice aren t speaking to each other ; the
need for transformative practice, professional and dialogic development
support, for different kinds of programmes and materials, more support-
ive environments and changed cultural attitudes. But we have side-
stepped an issue which sits at the heart of our data and which brings
some theoretical tension back into the discussion: the boy-friendly
pedagogy debate.
What has emerged throughout our study is the solidity of the biological
account of how boys/girls learn, what they re good at, what suits them,
202 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
what is appropriate for them; and how to teach them. This account is far
more popular than the more critically shaped, socially informed accounts
of gender constitution reviewed in Chapter 3. The combined power of trad-
itional power truth régimes, popular Men Are From Mars/Women Don t Read
Maps narratives, and scientifically and academically framed accounts of
brain differentiation is daunting. Occasional oppositional voices are heard
throughout our data, questioning the innate predisposition account; but
overall nature wins hands-down over nurture. Both teachers and students
detail in remarkably similar terms the shape of boys in school and in
language classrooms.
This leads logically to thinking and talking about boy-friendly peda-
gogy, about teaching strategies likely to engage boys interest, to support
their learning styles and innate predispositions. Teachers thinking about
boys talk repeatedly about active and autonomous learning, about cap-
italising on boys competitive nature, of accommodating their need for
physical activity and their interest in technology; of offering variety in
tasks, cognitive challenge, scaffolding for oral activities and for any-
thing else too closely associated with feminine ways of learning or
being (this last strategy suggests the seeds of a social consideration).
This way of thinking about boys as essentially different kinds of people,
and innately different kinds of learners, leads easily to thinking about
differentiated models of teaching. It keys comfortably into the wider
boys-schooling debate discussed in Chapter 3, and the argument that
schooling has to be more supportive of boys; that teaching and content
be reconsidered in light of what we know about boys. The main response
to the boys languages misalignment is therefore to make language
teaching and learning more attractive by crafting it into more boy-like
shape; adapting it to what are understood to be essentially differentiated
cognitive systems. There is little evidence of moves in the opposite direc-
tion: to make boys more languages friendly , to craft them into shapes
more compatible with the languages experience; little critical attention
to the shape itself.
Maybe this doesn t matter. Strategically, in the short term, maybe it s
even a good thing. Many of the identified features of masculine learning
styles are core components of good learning styles. If we revisit the
check-list of effective pedagogy either the informally gathered version
assembled by boys in our study or the formally defined version in L2
methodology courses many of the items can be moved unproblematic-
ally from the masculine learning style list to the effective teaching list:
active learning, cognitive challenges, authentic connections with real-life
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