Full Description
This volume addresses the historical neglect of women's contributions to language learning and teaching. While the historiography of language education has often focused on male-dominated frameworks, overlooking the pivotal roles women have played, the case studies in this book highlight female pioneers in language education across various cultural and linguistic traditions, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Covering a wide range of languages - including Greek, Arabic, French, and English - and exploring the gendered dimensions of language education, where social class and gender influence both the languages taught and the methods employed, the book reveals women's agency in shaping language education - and the systematic undervaluing of their contributions. In doing so, it calls for a broader, more inclusive historiography that recognises women's significant impact on the field, often in non-institutional and domestic contexts, and a reconsideration of the history of language education to acknowledge the contributions of women globally.
Contents
Sabine Doff, Giovanni Iamartino and Rachel Mairs - Researching women as teachers and learners of languages. An introduction
1 Rory G. Critten - French lessons in late-medieval England: The role of women
2 Raf Van Rooy - "Lend me your apt ears in silence": Ippolita Maria Sforza in Bonino Mombrizio's verse grammar of Greek (ca. 1465)
3 Helena Sanson - Learning languages for marriage: The linguistic experience of aristocratic women in Europe (1500-1800)
4 Ariane Ruyffelaert - The role of women in reflection on French grammar and the teaching of the French language
5 Ulrike Krampl - Gender in language learning and teaching in eighteenth-century Paris: A socio-historical view
6 Giovanni Iamartino - Young Hetty Thrale and her master of languages - learning Italian between fiction and real life in eighteenth-century England
7 Sabine Doff - Teaching living languages as political statement: Female teachers in nineteenth-century Germany
8 Alena A. Fidlérová - Teaching French at the first municipal higher girls' schools in Bohemia (1860s to 1870s)
9 Polina Shvanyukova - Writing a gendered history of English language teaching in Italy, 1861-1922
10 Etain Casey - Female English language teachers and learners at the University of London Holiday Course 1906-1955
11 Rachel Mairs - Singara Devi Chenapa - Mersha Chinnappa: Investigating a female author of a military Arabic phrasebook
12 Rachel Allan - "A day's work at washing": A corpus-based analysis of female-authored English teaching manuals for immigrants in the Americanisation era
13 Irmina Kotlarska - Women's role in promoting English culture through English-language school education in Poland (first half of the twentieth century)
14 Paola Spazzali - Nuns teaching German in twentieth-century Milan: The Deutsche Schule Istituto Giulia
