Investigation of gender construction in Algerian EFL communicative classrooms

: A historical decolonial feminist critical perspective

Abstract

This PhD research investigates how gender is linguistically constructed, via exploring classroom gendered questions, practices and discourses in five EFL (English as Foreign Language) communicative classrooms at the University of Frères Mentouri 1 in Constantine (Algeria). This is a novel interdisciplinary study which borrows from research traditions in sociolinguistics and education. The aim of this research is to examine gender in the classroom practices and how these might reflect the broader sociocultural context of Algeria. This will be carried out through a twofold investigation. First, I analyse gendered questions, i.e. types of these questions and gendered interactions between teachers and students. Second, I identify gendered discourses through selecting, explaining and analysing emerging linguistic items which serve as cues and traces of gendered discourses (Sunderland 2004). To address the aims and research questions, I merge and triangulate two analytical frameworks: Fairclough’s (1992,2003, 2015) Textual Oriented Discourse Analysis, and Sunderland’s (2004) Gendered Discourses. Furthermore, to produce an in-depth interpretation and reading of the findings, I triangulate three different theoretical frameworks namely: Historical Decolonial Feminism (Lazreg 1988, 1990, 1994, 2011; El Saadawi 1995, 2006, 2010b, 2015; Smail Salhi 2001, 2003,2008, 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2021), Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth FCDA) (Lazar 2005, 2007, 2014, 2017) and Classroom Discourse (Walsh 2013; Walsh & Li 2016).
Findings reveal that teachers employ gendered questions to engage on topics such as friendship, parenthood and fashion, whereby students seem to perpetuate fixed gendered roles and ideas about women and men. The classroom interactions also show that some dominant and marginal gendered discourses emerge. More specifically, the dominant gendered discourses are ‘gender differences’, ‘ideal Algerian woman’ and ‘religious’ discourses, while the marginal ones include ‘man as decision maker’ and ‘woman as domestic’ discourses. Through these gendered discourses, I argue that gendered unequal power relations are constructed, maintained and perpetuated. Therefore, the results are interpreted from a historical, decolonial, feminist, critical perspective using the theoretical triangulation mentioned above.
In drawing some conclusions, I argue that EFL communicative classrooms are social sites in which students and teachers are influenced by the historical, patriarchal, neo/colonial and sociopolitical contexts of Algeria, and where these influences find a fertile place for reproduction (as in the constitutive nature of discourses). Finally, this research contributes to the literature of the three triangulated theories. It also provides methodological contributions through triangulation of the two analytical frameworks to analyse EFL classroom discourse and develop an analytical framework to analyse gendered classroom questions.

Date of Award	Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Federica Formato (Supervisor) & Vy Rajapillai (Supervisor)