ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1019-1058 ]lntrml ~ www.elsevier.nl~ocate/pragma Teacher and student gender and peer group gender composition in German foreign language classroom discourse: An exploratory study* Monika Chavez Department of German, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Received 30 June 1997; revised version 30 April 1999 Abstract In recent years, issues of gender have gained greater prominence in second language research. However, gender has received little or no attention in the study of classroom dis- course, despite the fact that communication in the L2 often is both the means and the goal of language instruction. This exploratory study draws on gender-related research in first and sec- ond language, as well as on student self-reported data, to outline specific points for further, observational investigations of the effects of student, peer group, and teacher gender. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gender; Communicative language teaching; Classroom discourse; Discourse pat- terns; Foreign language; Second language I. Introduction Whereas gender has been considered as a variable in many studies on foreign and second t language receptive skills, particularly strategic behavior, it has not received The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of several people. She thanks two anonymous referees for their insightful comments which helped improve the manuscript. She would like to thank the editor for patiently shepherding the manuscript toward publication. Last not least, special thanks belong to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Testing and Evaluation, particularly its director Alan Cohen and statistician Young-Sun Lee. Without their assistance in collecting and analyz- ing these data, this project would not have been possible. Later in the paper, I will draw a distinction between second and foreign language learning, although one may argue that the two terms are not in true binary opposition to each other (see footnote # 9). When 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2(100 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00065-X