ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how gender and sexual identities emerge in classroom tasks and the implications for classroom language learning and politics. It focuses on data collected in two different contexts. The first is a study of English language teaching in a private language school in Russia serving professionally oriented adult learners. The second study was conducted in an all immigrant high school in the US. The focus of the original study of the adult EFL classroom in Russia was on the ways in which students actively negotiated language choice during class time. The implicit language policies at play in these classrooms intersected with the negotiation of women's identities, with gender playing an important role. These data thus suggest ways in which analysis of implicit language policy, if such analysis aims to 'make space for people', must take into account how individuals negotiate gender and sexuality as part of the learning process.
