A study of students’ grabbing the floor : ”put up your hand and holler cause that always works”

Sammanfattning: Equality between boys and girls is often discussed and is also stipulated in The Swedish National Curriculum. The present study examines students of English in Swedish secondary school from the perspective of grabbing the conversational floor in relation to the teacher. Previous research does not agree concerning which gender dominates the classroom. However, many researchers show that boys are the ones dominating the classroom. Observations were made in three classes of English in year 9 where specific aspects studied were on the one hand the gender of the student grabbing the floor and on the other hand the manner in which the individual student grabbed the floor. A questionnaire asking for the students’ attitudes towards grabbing the conversational floor was also distributed and is taken into account in the result of the present study. The research reveals three results where the fist result shows that the vast majority of both boys and girls grab the conversational floor in relation to the teacher by speaking out loud in the classroom. The second result shows that it is close to even between girls and boys concerning who dominates the conversational floor in relation to the teacher. The third result shows that both girls and boys consider raising ones hand to be the best way of grabbing the floor in relation to the teacher in the classroom. The students clearly stated the importance of the teacher’s way of teaching and his/her attitude towards how students should grab the floor. The differences between students attitudes towards manners of grabbing the floor and their actual ways of acting can therefore be connected to the teacher’s behavior in the classroom.