ABSTRACT
Fewer than 15% of all primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the ongoing worldwide debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have often been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male “role models” in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although earlier research has examined “teaching” as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom still is largely ignored, especially regarding discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms both in the UK and Germany, this chapter examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics and the Community of Practice framework. It explores how discipline is performed in the classroom to address the question, does teacher gender matter?
