Enseñar la lengua con perspectiva de género, ¿una necesidad actual?

Abstract

In  the  last few  years,  political  and  social events  have raised the  awareness about  the  gender  issue,  which  in  turn  has  led  to  new  gender  equality programs  and  guideline  plans.  As  a  consequence,  gender-inclusive  and non-sexist  language  guidelines  are  commonboth  at  administrative  and education  institutions.Based on the “General Recommendations,” which coincidentally prescribe, we have looked at the language contents involved in the practical application of those guidelines. Firstly, we identified if they refer  to  grammar  aspects  (morpho-syntactic  or  morpho-lexical  patterns), pragmatic aspects or others. Then, given the high number of references to grammar  content,  we  concluded  that  it  is  necessary  to  teach  impersonal and    passive    voice    sentence    structures,    aswell    as    gender-neutral determiners.  Moreover,  the  usage  of  relative  pronouns  in  subordinate clauses and  the  meaning  of  prepositions need  to  be  taught  at  school.The objective of this paper is to analyze the contents underlying the “General Recommendations” section in the guidelines selected for this study with the  aim  to  determine  which  contents  to  teach  and  which  approaches  to adopt,  and  thus  make  the  most  effective  use  of  the  guidelines.  Since  we work  around  the  concept  of  text  as  an  empirical  object,  framed  within socio-discursive interactionism, we present the analysis of the guidelines as a  contribution  to  the  successful  implementation  of  the  guidelines.We believe   that   a   deeper   knowledge   of   the   language   we   use   to  express ourselves  is  key  to  achieve  a language  management  that  enables  gender inclusive use and an internalization of values that encourages symmetrical relationship implementation.