Recent research has revealed a gender gap in reading attitudes and achievement. Broadly
speaking, when compared with girls, boys display a more negative attitude towards
reading and perform less well on measures of reading achievement. Yet, why boys appear
to have such difficulties with reading and why girls appear to have fewer difficulties with
it has yet to be fully explored. This thesis examines the talk of a group of grade five and
six students at a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, mixed socio-economic urban elementary
school, concerning their ideas of gender normative behaviour, gendered reading practices
and the consequences of non-normative gender performances or gender crossing
behaviour. Using Critical Socio-Cultural theories of literacy and learning and Feminist
Post-Structuralist theories of gender and identity, this year long ethnographic study
reveals that students' investments in their gender identities may help to create and
maintain the gender gap in reading attitudes and achievement. In particular, boys'
investment in maintaining a heteronormative masculine identity may interfere with their
participation in school based print literacy. The implications of these findings for
bridging the gender reading gap are discussed. In addition, this thesis raises questions
about the simplicity of current conceptions of the gender reading gap that depict boys as
victims and girls as victors in school. This thesis adds to research that calls for a more
complex understanding of issues of gender, "race" and class in .contemporary classrooms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14357 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Moffatt, Lyndsay Elizabeth |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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