Gender-fair language (GFL) in the academic writing of pre-service teachers of Spanish

Gender-fair language (GFL) in the academic writing of pre-service teachers of Spanish Francisco Núñez-Román* Coral I. Hunt Gómez and Alejandro Gómez- Camacho a Department of Language and Literature Teaching, University of Seville, Spain; The article analyses the use of GFL in a corpus of 187 academic texts created by pre-service teachers. It reveals how participants reached a balance between the recommendations of GFL guides and the standard normative grammar included in the school curriculum. The study shows that although future teachers are aware of GFL and sensitive to discrimination, they used a combination of the generic masculine with GFL recommendations when deemed necessary. This has great pedagogical potential for the Spanish classroom, together with the potential to transform language and society. Keywords: Gender-Fair Language, academic writing, teacher training, sexist language Introduction Sexist language has been defined as ‘words, phrases, and expressions that unnecessarily differentiate between women and men or exclude, trivialize, or diminish either gender’ (Parks and Roberton 1998, 455). Research has shown that not using gender-fair language (GFL) fosters women’s invisibility and lack of role recognition, and thus GFL is a powerful tool when fighting discrimination as it forces social change through language use (Gabriel, Gygax and Kuhn 2018; Koeser, Kuhn and Sczesny 2015; Stout and Dasgupta 2011). There is a growing body of literature that recognizes successes resulting from the implementation of GFL policies (Bengoechea 2011; Lomotey 2015; Nissen 2013; Winter and Pauwels 2006a). However, these policies must still overcome several obstacles (Lomotey 2018; Maldonado García 2015; Nissen 2002). The use of GFL is generally a personal decision that is effortful, and which can be enhanced through the reading of texts with gender-fair forms modelling this aspect of communication (Koeser and Sczesny 2014; Sczesny, Moser and Wood 2015). In the case of Spanish, the democratization of GFL forms has been impaired by the Spanish Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE) and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE). These institutions exert an enormous influence over the approximately 600 million people who speak Spanish as a first or second language. From these institutions’ perspective, lexical or morphological forms suggested as alternatives to sexist language are unnecessary and redundant (Real Academia Española 2009). This rejection has contributed to the RAE being branded a patriarchal institution composed of men who oppose gender-fair language alternatives due to ideological bias rather than on objective linguistic grounds (Peris Vidal 2013, 189). One of the main tools in fighting sexist language is the production of GFL guides (Guerrero Salazar 2007). In Spain, GFL guides have been produced by the public authorities, and universities, as institutions based on egalitarian principles, advocate their implementation. Consequently, GFL-form recommendations have recently been published for use in higher education (Guerrero Salazar 2013). As a result of those actions, the data on the use of GFL in universities and its influence on students and lectures shows a positive trend in some societies and for some languages (Garnham et al. 2012; Sarrasin, Gabriel and Gygax 2012). From a longitudinal perspective, an increase in the use of GFL has been reported (Nissen 2013), and there are positive results on the acceptance of some GFL forms among university students, such as the use of @ to refer to both sexes or, in the Spanish case, a preference for epicene nouns (Bengoechea and Simón 2014). For English-, German- and French-speakers, research carried out by Sarrasin, Gabriel and Gygax (2012) establishes that students with a negative attitude towards women experience greater difficulties in recognising sexist language and adopt a more hostile position towards GFL. Despite these advances, several studies indicate that there is still a need to raise awareness of GFL among university students. Patev et al. (2019) studied the connection between everyday GFL and the factors that may impede use of it; results showed that speakers found it easier to use every day GFL if their exposure to it was greater. The study also concluded that potential barriers impeding use of GFL, for example, the fact that it is difficult to use, and it lacks clear norms or tradition within certain speakers’ communities, have their origin in prejudice towards gender equality. Noteworthy reasons given by students for not using GFL are the principle of economy of language and respect for the rules set down by the RAE (Jiménez Rodrigo, Román Onsalo and Traverso Cortés 2011). Another oft-repeated reason is that GFL allegedly impairs comprehensibility, even though recent studies show that GFL does not have a negative influence on readability (Friedrich and Heise 2019). Gender Fair Language Strategies Like other grammatical gender languages, Spanish tends to use the masculine form as the generic form; a morphological procedure that uses the masculine option to refer to a group regardless of its gender composition. This is considered to be one of the main challenges for GFL, as the RAE’s grammar rules considers the masculine form to be a non-marked neutral and reject every possible alternative which explicitly refers to the presence of women (Real Academia Española 2009, 88). This phenomenon, typical of grammatical gender languages, is one of the main obstacles to making women visible through language. Studies of English, French and German associate the use of the generic masculine with negative attitudes towards women (Parks and Roberton 2004; Sarrasin, Gabriel and Gygax 2012; Swim, Mallett and Stangor 2004). Along the same lines, research has confirmed the link between the grammatical gender of occupations and their social perception (Budziszewska, Hansen, and Bilewicz 2014; Formanowicz et al. 2013; Gabriel et al. 2008; Horvath et al. 2016). Sczesny, Formanowicz and Moser affirm that: When masculine forms are used it is women who are seen as less prototypical category exemplars, it is women who feel less adequate or are less preferred as job candidates, and it is women who profit from GFL (2016, 7-8). Various studies have confirmed that the use of forms alternative to the generic masculine, such as pair forms (inventores e inventoras) or collective names (estudiantado), strengthens an egalitarian representation of women (Chatard et al. 2005; Gabriel 2008; Gabriel, Gygax and Kuhn 2018). For example, although having been associated with male representation, the use of collective names has been shown to favour a gender-fair interpretation of the term (Irmen and Roßberg 2004). However, Gabriel, Gygax and Kuhn (2018, 851) note that ‘neutralization efforts might result in contributing to reducing the visibility of gender biases but not in correcting or mitigating them’. Notwithstanding this last remark, we believe that, as an alternative to the use of the generic masculine, pair forms and collective nouns can also be considered the most frequent mechanisms used to make women visible or, at least, avoid sexism, Briz Gómez (2011) offers a taxonomy of alternatives to the use of the generic masculine selected according to the following criteria: “norma grammatical, coherencia textual, contexto situacional y ámbitos o genéricos discursivos” (Briz 2011, 21). For the purposes of this study, these mechanisms have been divided into two groups (Table 1). The first group includes those normative mechanisms whose use is expressly accepted, such as the slash (Real Academia Española 2010, 426) and the use of pairs forms when there is ambiguity or linguistic sexism (Real Academia Española 2009, 87), together with mechanisms that the academic sources do not consider to be incorrect. The second group comprises those mechanisms which have clearly been flagged as incorrect by the academic sources, for example, the use of the at symbol (Real Academia Española 2017) or the use of the double article (Real Academia Española 2009; 2017). The second group also covers those uses in which the generic masculine is sufficiently clear so as include individuals from one and the other sex (Real Academia Española 2009, 87) following Briz’s recommendations (2011, 41-44). The latter, which do not adhere to the grammatical standard, are accordingly rejected by educated speakers. [table 1 to appear about here] According the RAE, the use of slashes indicates the existence of two or more possible options (Real Academia Española 2017); whereas using pair forms, even if could be considered an avoidable circumlocution (Real Academia Española 2009), is not explicitly marked as incorrect. Gender Fair Language and Education This dichotomy is especially relevant for primary education teachers. As linguistic models for their students, they cannot ignore the standard norm, but they must not forget that school is an important sphere in the fight against sexist language and, consequently, the discriminatory attitudes it represents. Winter and Pauwels define the role of GFL education as ‘[…] not a mere external agent of implementation but central to the raising of awareness or provoking an “Initiating Trajectory”’ (2016b, 171). Thus, a teacher’s day- to-day work is paramount in achieving GFL. From a pedagogical perspective, teachers transmit and raise awareness of the principles of respect and equality through use of GFL in the classroom, and specifically, by using the GFL alternatives already employed by educated speakers Research has proved that gender differences and the conceptualization of the characteristics attributed to each sex appear between 18 and 24 months, and gender stereotypes are consolidated at the age of three (Lévy et al. 2016; Martin and Ruble 2010). Thus, boys’ and girls’ perception of the roles of men and women, particularly the way of naming and describing those roles, is already established before children start primary education and that perception is reinforced by their everyday experience. Given the importance of primary education, many studies have been conducted on the exposure of children and teenagers to GFL at school. These studies conclude that the use of GFL helps to make women visible (Chatard, Guimond, and Martinot 2005; Liben, Bigler and Krogh 2002; Vervecken et al. 2015). A study on how gender-fair job descriptions impact children’s perceptions and interest regarding traditionally male occupations was developed by Vervecken, Hannover and Wolter (2013). Children who were asked the question ‘who can succeed in this occupation?’ using a pair form (for example, inventores e inventoras) presented a higher degree of gender equality than those who were asked the same question using the generic masculine. Another study showed that when asked about famous people doing certain occupations, more examples of women were given when pair forms were used than in cases where the same questions were asked using the generic masculine (Vervecken and Hannover 2015). Gender stereotypes and the use of GFL in textbooks have also been widely studied: Mills and Mustapha (2015) provided a general overview; Bengoechea and Simón (2010), Bernabé-Villodre and Martínez-Bello (2018), and Manassero and Vázquez, (2002) studied the Spanish case; Gouvias and Alexopoulos (2018), and Kostas (2019), the Greek; Lee and Collins (2009), among others, studied the English language; and Moser and Hannover (2014), the German. These authors claim that there is still a long way to go in terms of gender equality and they agree on the importance of choosing nonsexist resources which use GFL, while highlighting the role of teachers in that choice. According to Sczesny et al. (2016), textbook authors should receive training in and be aware of GFL policies. Teachers are, therefore, essential in the dissemination of GFL as they are speakers who have the sometimes-conflicting obligations of following the standard norm and using GFL (Pauwels and Winter 2006; Valiente 2002). The educational system plays a key role in the success of any linguistic reform (various orthographic reforms should be noted) and teachers are generally groundbreakers in the dissemination and incorporation of such reforms (Winter and Pauwels 2006b). These authors advocate the efficiency of ‘the rolemodel framework’, a linguistic planning microstructure in which a speaker, the teacher, individually tries to follow the GFL model and acts as an agent of change in their ‘community of practice’. This is a different strategy from the so-called ‘top-down’ conditions such as the dissemination of GFL guides or legislative reforms to promote them. However, male educators are more likely to follow rather than adopt that leading position (Pauwels and Winter 2006). In some cases, teachers reject GFL. For example, Kuhn and Gabriel (2014) observed that lecturers avoided the use of GFL in higher-level academic texts despite having other variables which encouraged it. Another example is the study with primary-, secondary- and university-level teachers by Pauwels and Winter (2006). It established that younger teachers are less aware of grammatical correctness and that they acquire GFL naturally, most likely because they used it more frequently and, consequently, found it easier to employ. Research questions Although extensive research has been carried out on GFL, no single study exists regarding the results of GFL policies on the writing practices of future Primary education teachers. The main objective of this study is to explore academic texts produced by undergraduate students in their final year in order to identify and classify GFL alternatives accepted by the students as part of their usual practice in written texts. It also attempts to determine which linguistic uses can be incorporated into textbooks and teaching practice in the Spanish language classroom, seeking to promote GFL as a part of the standard normative grammar. The following questions are central to this research: (1) What are the GFL mechanisms used by final-year students of Degree in Primary School Teaching in their academic texts as alternatives to the systematic use of the generic masculine? (2) Are alternatives which do not correspond to the standard norm used in the academic texts of Degree in Primary School Teaching students in their final year? (3) Is there a correlation between the author’s sex and GFL use? Method Sample Corpus linguistics analyses a vast number of computerized texts offering a real representation of the trends of use of one or more language varieties (McEnery and Wilson 1996). It has been a valuable tool for the study of the representation of women in language, particularly in English (Baker 2014). Research confirmed that certain languages do not use GFL and create a sexist and stereotyped image of women. For example, Kjellmert (1986) offered a detailed study of the role of women in written corpora, and Baker (2013) and Pearce (2008) analysed women’s representation in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the trends that led to linguistic change towards GFL, confirming a decrease in the frequency in the presence of male terms from a diachronic perspective. Other research compares GFL use in corpora from different linguistic communities (Romaine 2001) or the use of the term girl in a written corpus (Sigley and Holmes, 2002), with very interesting insights into how gender is socially constructed. In all the studies reviewed here, “it is undoubtedly the case that corpus-based research offers a valuable window on the usage trends to which language consumers are exposed” (Sigley and Holmes 2002, 154). The corpus used in this work, named FDD-Edu, contains 187 FDD (Final Degree Dissertations) from final-year students of the Degree in Primary School Teaching at 16 Spanish universities. The Degree in Primary School Teaching trains future teachers of Spanish to work at a basic and compulsory level. Annex I sets out the list of universities included in the study. For data protection reasons, no other demographic data regarding the participants was available. The FDD-Edu corpus is composed of two sub-corpora according to the gender of the author: FDD-M (male authors) and FDD-F (female authors). FDD selection was made following two criteria: (i) time range of the FDD (2014-2017); and (ii) being available in an institutional open-access repository with quality criteria. The length of each FDD is 10,000-22,000 words. Front pages, index, bibliography, and references to the names of real people have been deleted. The number of tokens for sub-corpora is presented in table 2. [table 2 to appear about here] The analysis is corpus driven (Tognini-Bonelli 2001), since the only source of items has been the corpus itself, not any previous hypothesis or prior list or keywords. 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