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PMDC needs to wake up | Research trends in language
PMDC needs to wake up
Aug 04, 2008: They may not be there in numbers but owners of medical institutions are apparently ruling the roost at
the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), which has remained in the news
for some time for one reason or the other. Their presence would not have been an
issue had it not been to the detriment of the cause of medical education in the
country which is on a decline in the absence of professional monitoring. With
private medical institutions enjoying influence in the regulatory body itself,
the conflict of interest is too obvious to be missed. No wonder then that the
fee structure keeps going up without matching improvement in infrastructure or
quality of teaching. All this has been going on for long but now, with at least
one of the owners publicly enjoying close links with the government, the
influence has only grown that much more. This is evident in the manner in which
the PMDC secretary, who had a reputation of being his own man, was sidelined.
Thereafter provisional NOCs to private enterprises were converted into
full-scale permits without any let or hindrance. All rules and regulations were
set aside. To ensure smooth sailing in their not-above-board undertaking PMDC
members have strongly resisted the election of a senior member of the Pakistan
Medical Association from Sindh who is known to have questioned the credibility
of many private medical colleges. Held after 13 long years, the election result
notification was put off for several weeks before someone arranged a stay order
from a court. A year after the elections, the medical practitioner has yet to
take his seat on the council.
Political and commercial reasons have
together brought things to such a pass that the PMDC is seriously struggling to
function as a regulatory body. What is urgently required is an autonomous
representative of the various stakeholders in the equation who may ensure
compliance with the standing criteria for both public and private medical
institutions in terms of infrastructure, faculty and facilities. Medical
education is not an area that can be left to the whim and fancy of certain
individuals. Dawn
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Research trends in language
Research on language and gender is not very old. Linguists perhaps recognised
the importance of this field relatively late when in the 1970s we saw a number
of research papers and books published on this subject.
Before we look at
some seminal trends in the research on language and gender, I would like to
briefly mention Jesperson's work, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin.
Jesperson's book, published in 1922, contained a chapter about women's language.
The title of the chapter was 'The Woman' which suggested a language deviant from
the norm. The norm in this case was the language spoken by men.
The first
important book, completely devoted to language and gender research, was Robin
Layoff's book, Language and Woman's Place in 1975. The book focused on women's
language and the attributes that make it 'weak'. Some of the characteristics of
women's language highlighted by Lakoff are: (a) women have a large stock of
words related to their specific interests, generally related to them as 'woman's
work'; (b) 'empty' adjectives like divine, charming, cute; (c) tag questions,
(d) the use of hedges, for example well, y'know, kinda, and so forth; (e) the
use of the intensive 'so'; (f) hyper-correct grammar; and (g) women don't tell
jokes.
Lakoff talked about the dilemma that women face. On the one hand
society expects a woman to act ladylike and on the other hand when women's
speech is ladylike their language is said to have become weak. The Lakoff
approach to women's language is popularly known as the deficit approach as it
considers women language deficient. Lakoff's book was criticised for its
non-scientific research methods as she relied heavily on 'introspection and
linguistic intuition' and also for its dichotomising language groups on a sex
basis. Despite this criticism Lakof's book remains a central reference book in
research on language and gender. It is interesting to see that just after the
publication of this book, a large number of short courses, articles and books
were launched for women to train women on assertiveness. The intriguing part of
it was that the model or standard to which all the training was geared was in
the assertive style of men.
After Lakoff came Dale Spender who wrote an
influential book, Man Made Language. Instead of talking about the deficiency of
women, this book focused on the dominance of men. The book claimed that
differences between the language of men and women in fact reflect their social
differences in real life. The men play a dominant role in society and this
dominance shows in language use as well. Spender claims that "English language
has been literally man made [sic] and that it is still primarily under man's
control …"
Like Lakoff, Spender dealt with men and women as two distinct
groups and did not take care to address the sub-groups within the two major
groups. This model (based on Spender's book) is called the dominance model. Both
of these models, deficit and dominance, are accusative in nature.
A third
book that influenced discussion on language and gender was Deborah Tannen's, You
Just Don't Understand. This book offered a new thesis regarding language
differences. According to Tannen, men and women are brought up in two different
cultures, i.e. men-specific and women-specific cultures. This two-cultures model
is called the difference model. It is different from the deficit and dominance
models in the sense that it does not blame either men or women. But it seems to
be similar to these models as it also dichotomises men and women on the basis of
sex.
Tannen's book became an instant bestseller as people could relate to
their daily life communication experiences. At the same time the book came under
a lot of criticism from feminist critics as, according to them, the "difference
model" is not sensitive to the socio-political realities where men wield power
because of their dominant social roles. As the book doesn't appreciate the
socio-political context of language it is termed as a 'to do book' that does not
try to problemitise the issue of language, gender, and power.
For a long
period of time the focus of research on language and gender was on the
difference of language (grammar, lexicon, pronunciation, etc) spoken by men and
women. Gradually a more important question came into focus, i.e. language used
about women. This question raised the issue of power and representation. We see
some useful research in the discriminatory use of language, i.e. naming, titles,
use of the masculine pronoun, collocation, etc. But to understand the problem at
a deeper level we need to understand the politics of discourse and the hegemonic
role of language. We see some enlightening research by Jane Sunderland and Ruth
Wodak who approached the issue from a critical discourse analysis and tried to
trace the dynamics of hegemonic representation with special emphasis on the
construction of discourse.
The feminist critique on the question of
language and gender came in the form of Deborah Cameron's edited book called
Feminist Critique of Language. This book is structured around three themes, i.e.
the theme of silence and exclusion from language, the theme of naming and
representation and the theme of behavioural differences in
language.
Deborah Cameron's critical introductions to each of these
themes are quite insightful. Hall and Bucholtz in their book, Gender
Articulated, suggest three directions of feminist research on language and
gender: "the investigation of how cultural paradigms of gender relations are
perpetuated through language; the study of women's innovative use of language to
subvert this dominant belief system; and the examination of how women construct
social identities and communities that are not determined in advance by gender
ideologies."
The contemporary stance on language and gender is more
interdisciplinary in nature as the question of power needs to be explored from
various different angles. The other change is that instead of dividing men and
women on the basis of sex into two distinct groups the researchers realise the
significance of sub-groups formed not strictly on the basis of sex. A third
change is that instead of focusing on the language used by women, the emphasis
has shifted to the language spoken about women. The question of representation
has come to the forefront.
The writer is director, Centre for Humanities
and Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics and author of Rethinking
Education in Pakistan.
By Dr Shahid Siddiqui
shahidksiddiqui@yahoo.com (Dawn)
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