Gender and Ethnicity as Factors in the Development of Verbal Skills in Bilingual Mexican American Women

Abstract

This study describes and analyzes differences in student output across ethnicity and gender in a mixed monolingual English and bilingual Spanish/English class in order to understand how L2 oral language skills are developed in a mixed classroom. Primary participants in the study included approximately 30 basic writing students ranging in age from 18 to 60. Fifty-five percent of the students were bilingual Mexican American, and the remainder were monolingual Anglo Americans. Participant observation, informal interviews, and audio-tape classroom and tutorial interaction provide the data for this classroom ethnography. Data were analyzed to discover patterns of student output in various interfactional contexts and to discover how the structure and content of interaction influenced these patterns. The analysis revealed that bilingual Mexican American students spoke significantly less in whole class interaction than monolingual Anglo American students. Moreover, an analysis by gender revealed that Mexican American men contributed four times the amount expected, whereas Mexican American women spoke half as much as expected. In other interfactional contexts, however, the bilingual women were quite verbal. The social status of Mexican American women as “double minorities” and negative attitudes toward Spanish/English bilingual help explain why the Mexican American women alone responded to whole class interaction with silence.