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performance of large numbers of boys is not a new phenomenon; what is
new, is the changing context in which this performance is now sitting;
and what is sliding by many of the louder current debates is the fact that
there are very different levels of achievement among boys. Some boys are
doing very well (Harris, 1998). Gender remains a powerful predictor of
literacy performance in relation to some boys in some contexts (as it does
for some girls in some contexts); but it is crucially impacted by other vari-
ables. Any discussion of boys and literacy performance which leaves such
variables out of the explanatory grid is unlikely to be helpful.
The debate has become increasingly oppositional recently in the
United Kingdom, with conflicting evidence emerging from differently
framed research projects. On the one hand, as in Australia, there are
The Gendering of Languages Education 37
official reports which document clear and increasing patterns of gender
differentiation, with boys showing comparatively poor and declining
outcomes (e.g., Brookes (NFE), in Carvel, 1998; Speed, 1998; Stobart,
Elwood and Quinlan, 1992). On the other hand, there is growing research
evidence as in the Canadian study referred to above of quite different
patterns, challenging the gender gap account, suggesting that any such
gap is actually shrinking if it were indeed ever actually there (e.g., Arnot,
David and Weiner, 1996; Gorard, Rees and Salisbury, 1999; Mahony,
1998). These more critical accounts argue that boys in general are not
underperforming at senior levels of schooling, but that working-class boys
are (Pyke, 1996:2); and that, for a variety of reasons, this poor perform-
ance is becoming more visible. Research data analysed by Murphy and
Elwood demonstrate that in some contexts male students continue to out-
perform girls in maths and sciences, but are also now outperforming them
in English (1997:19). There is a growing sense of dissatisfaction with both
the research methodology which produces the gender gap model of
analysis (see Gorard, Rees and Salisbury, 1999, for a more detailed review
of this literature) and with the translation of the results into wider com-
munity discourses which construct boys as a homogeneous category. The
totalising logic which works beneath this model not only ignores the
complexities of gender identity and performance, and the differences and
possible shades of positioning which get played out by individual girls or
boys, but ignores the significance of the intersection in individual lives of
variables such as gender and social class.
It is interesting to consider the timing of the boys education crisis .
The argument is made in Australia, the United Kingdom and North
America that problems now being identified and reacted to have in fact
been around for a long time (Davison et al., 2004; Lingard and Douglas,
1999; Mahony, 1998); and that current moral panic over boys perceived
underachievement has close and largely unscrutinised connections
with current politics of standards debates, which in turn have signifi-
cant links to changing social and economic conditions (Slee, Weiner and
Tomlinson, 1998). What is relatively new is the tendency to blame the
failure of the boys on the perceived success of the girls (Lingard and
Douglas, 1999:54). Attention might also be directed to the connection
between anxiety around gender-based literacy performance indicators
and current imperatives of educational policy and management. As Ali,
Benjamin and Mauthner (2004) remind us, there is a politics of gender
and education, whereby micro-politics and macro-politics act on, shape
and inform each other. Alloway and Gilbert (1997), for example, query
the framing of the boys literacy crisis in Australia as a recent, urgent
38 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
issue, suggesting that boys lower achievement in language and literacy
has not been of concern before now because these areas were seen as less
important than those of maths and science; therefore the literacy per-
formance of boys was not seen as something to be concerned about.
Changing circumstances in the wider cultural, social and employment
fields, for example the increasing move to wide-scale employment in the
service industry (with its requirement of good communication and liter-
acy skills), are identified as significant contributing factors in the current
flurry of attention to boys and literacy. Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman (2002)
point out that as educational demands have shifted and increased, boys
ways of expressing masculinities have become less compatible with the
gaining of educational qualifications, at a time when it is increasingly
important for them to do so because fewer unskilled jobs are available
(p. 196).
Acknowledging these interconnections brings into focus the relevance
of the which boys? question. The boys who are underachieving are
mainly boys from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and NESB boys,
who have been doing badly in school for a long time. McDowall (2002),
in her discussion of young masculine identities in the context of the
transition from school to work, details the huge impact of economic
change on working-class boys options, through what she describes
as deep transformations in the labour market of mature industrial
economies in recent decades (p. 40); changes in the labour market hav-
ing further consolidated existing social inequalities. She comments on
the easy slippage between recognising working-class boys as victims of
economic and occupational restructuring and seeing them as victims
of changing school circumstances: victims of schooling (ibid.). (See
also, Arnot, David and Weiner, 1999.)
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