‘I Don't Want to Do the Gender Division, but …’: A Gendered Linguistic Ideological Perspective in Talk About Schoolchildren's Writing in England

This article explores how education stakeholders in England represent primary school writing attainment along the axis of gender in the context of literacy concerns after the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a combination of corpus-based and qualitative critical discourse analyses, it shows how gendered linguistic ideological practices are reproduced in education stakeholders’ talk about children's writing. The findings reveal that while traditional gender-gap ideologies have not consistently been supported by research on children's writing since the early 2000s, they seem to still be broadly conaturalized in stakeholders’ discourses. Crucially, this conaturalization seems to be unconscious: Those interviewed seem to resist hegemonic gender stereotypes on writing attainment yet at the same time they tend to (re)produce normative gendered discourses that reify hegemonic masculine and feminine norms and perpetuate, at the practical level, inequalities in their appraisal of primary schoolchildren's writing.