Do Gender and Ethnicity Make the Difference? Linguistic Evaluation Bias in Primary School

In two studies, we examined how primary school teachers use the subtle structural properties of language to communicate different evaluations of students who achieve higher versus lower marks, boys versus girls, and students with immigrant versus nonimmigrant origins. Written judgments of final evaluation records were coded for language abstraction. Results showed that students with higher marks are described with more abstract positive and more concrete negative terms than those receiving lower marks. By varying language abstraction teachers also communicate more favorable evaluations of girls than boys and of students with nonimmigrant than immigrant origins. These findings uncovered a linguistic evaluation bias that implicitly enhances girls’ qualities and performance, but hinder improvements of boys and students of immigrant families by focusing on their stable negative characteristics.