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Children's worlds are arenas in which power, privilege and access are created, sought after, won and lost. Language is a major resource which allows children to make their way through the world. Language is also a powerful medium for teaching cultural novices, such as children, the community's tacit and dominant (that is, hegemonic) prescriptions for constructing gender (see Connell, 1987: 183ff for a discussion of gender hegemony). One of the major contributions of research on children's language is that it reveals how competent preschool children are with language, correctly encoding not only linguistic features, but also pragmatic and social features. Young children have a working knowl edge of appropriateness, that is, of how talk should fit the context and addressee (Andersen, 1990; McTear, 1985). It should not be surprising, therefore, that young children's social uses of language would reflect tacit …