Identity work in the academic writing classroom: Where gender meets social class

This article examines how non traditional male undergraduate students from linguistic minorities perform gender on an academic writing programme and what this tells us about the significance of gender for the teaching of academic writing in the contemporary academy. I focus on how gender is performed in talk about academic discourse and reveal the attraction of 'laddish' identities. I aim to deepen understanding in EAP of the importance of the social world on classroom relations and contribute to research that has considered identity in relation to the written outputs of students and scholars. To gain a more nuanced understanding of gender, an intersectional approach is adopted, in which gender is viewed in intersection with social class. I argue that the gender-class nexus is of significance for teaching academic writing in that it reveals how the social world orients students to language learning and their positioning in deficit discourses. I demonstrate how understanding of these issues can be developed through fine-grained analysis of spoken interaction and contend that language-as-resource approaches to linguistic diversity offer a productive way forward for EAP and for teaching in contexts of linguistic diversity in higher education.