1 Gender and English Language Learners: Challenges and Possibilities Bonny Norton and Aneta Pavlenko CHAPTER 1 [FINAL DRAFT] INTRODUCTION During the past decade, several scholars in the fields of language education, second language acquisition, and bilingualism have addressed the influence of gender on access to linguistic and interactional resources, on dynamics of classroom interaction, and on language learning outcomes (Ehrlich, 1997; Norton, 2000; Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenko et al., 2001; Sunderland, 2000). The field of TESOL has also exhibited a growing interest in the impact of gender on ESL and EFL learning, seen in the increasing number of plenaries, panels, discussion groups, and papers on the topic. Yet the nature of the connection between the two phenomena, gender and language learning, remains elusive, or rather it is seen differently by different scholars and educators. Some studies continue to appeal to variationist and interactional sociolinguistics methodology, treating gender as a variable, while others, grounded in critical, poststructuralist, and feminist theory, approach gender as a system of social relations and discursive practices. It is the latter approach that informs this introduction and most of the contributions to the volume. In what follows, we will discuss the feminist poststructuralist view of gender, outline its role in the context of ESL and EFL learning, and show how the contributions to this volume enrich TESOL theory and praxis, illuminating the key features of critical feminist pedagogy in TESOL. DEFINING GENDER Most if not all scholars who are interested in the role of gender in language education see themselves as feminist. We do not dispute this, yet we want to point out that there are multiple approaches to feminism which espouse distinct views of gender and its relationship to language (cf. Gibbon, 1999). Until recently, two approaches have been most influential in the study of language and gender (for a detailed discussion, see Ehrlich, 1997; Pavlenko & Piller, 2001). The view of the two genders, male and female, as different cultures, common for cultural feminism, has guided the search for gender differences in language learning and use. The emphasis on patriarchy, typical for material feminism, informed research on male dominance in interaction. We argue that neither approach can be assumed unproblematically in the field of TESOL since both frameworks see ‘men’ and ‘women’ as undifferentiated and unitary groups, members of which have more in common with each other than with the members of the other group. What are the problems with such a view? To begin with, in its most radical form such an approach, relying on outdated claims in the field of psychology, conflates ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ and ‘sex’ with brain structure and leads to oversimplified generalizations along the lines of “females are superior in verbal skills, while males are superior in spatial skills... females are slightly more feeling oriented, while males are slightly more thinking oriented” (Oxford, 2002: 252). In reality, however, current work in neuroscience suggests that human brain functioning is a complex