Hi for a second time to all interested readers in my blog,

This time I will give you something interesting that all you teachers should comtemplate ... is English really a gendered language? At least this is what many eminent linguists consider to be the case (mostly female linguists, yet there are a significant number of male linguists too). And to make the matter even worse, it is thought that English is an anti-female language due to its linguistic prejudice against the female sex, while the male population take all the credit in language.

Remember the child rhyme: "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me!"? Then why is it so inappropriate for a woman in today's world to be called a businessman, or to refer to two women talking privately about some issue, a man-to-man conversation. The situation in these previous decades has slightly changed, and we sometimes hear the noun businesswoman or the adjective woman-to-woman, yet what is mind-boggling is that it's the male form that in 95% of cases in English appears first, from which the female gender is formed. Just like the story of Adam and Eve, and how Eve comes from Adam's rib ... familiar? (No offence, just given as an example for comparison)

This anti-female bias normally appears in generally accepted writing conventions (like the pronoun he in sentences referring back to the noun teacher, which might refer to a person belonging to the female sex), or in gendered nouns (like the previous example of businessman, fireman, policeman), etc. Nevertheless, there do exist replacements for the above given examples, such as use of the plural pronoun instead of he, or just saying businessperson, firefighter, police officer ... however things in language are not always that straightforward, mostly because of the question that has arisen of why people think of men first then women. Are we programmed this way? Do we have this knowledge already written out in our minds before our birth in the womb? Or are we born tabula rasa (as a blank slate) and have all these prejudices 'inserted' in our brains through the different levels of education? If we believe that women and men are socially equal, then we should seriously rethink how that belief is expresed in the English language.

I am directing my focus on this issue in particular in ELT because I have heard numerous examples of teachers who believe in equality between men and women in society and fight for that, however they do not express these views in language, and what's worse they subconsciously use such biased language in their English classes, which means that their pupils (students) will think that what their teacher says in class in what they should emulate.

In my opinion, teachers of English should be very careful when using language in class, especially in terms of word choice which refers to both females and males, because once said (especially for young learners) always remembered and hard to erase.

To finish off my blog post, read the following joke, and think about the answer ... you'll see what I mean:

A man and his son were in an automobile accident. The father was killed and the son, who was critically injured, was rushed to a hospital. As attendants wheeled the unconscious boy into the emergency room, the doctor on duty looked down at him and said, "My God, he's my son!" So what is the connection between the doctor and the boy? I hope you didn't find it hard to answer ... a mother-son relationship, of course!

Until next reading,

Best, Aneta