Do Male Undergraduates Write More Argumentatively?

Abstract

Research on linguistic variation across gender has focused mainly on oral language. However, second language (L2) writing research has began to explore gender as an important variable in the socio-cultural context of writers in the last few decades. This paper aimed to explain how gender identity in relation to L2 writing is viewed as multiple and dynamic rather than as predictable or universal in modern social constructionist understandings. It contrasts this view with three traditional fixed notions of gender: a) the male dominance framework, b) the female deficit approach, and c) the male-female dual culture model. We also aimed to illustrate how a group of male and female undergraduate students of English as a foreign language varied in their written position statements on the controversial topic of euthanasia. Around 100 third-year undergraduate EFL learners consented to write 100-200 word argumentative pieces on the topic in 2010. Quantitative lexico-grammatical analyses of their performance and the qualitative discourse analysis of the position statements across genders revealed significant gender differences in terms of tokens, number of word types, type-token ratio, average word length, number of sentence, lexical complexity, lexical sophistication as well as in general rhetorical organization. Results of the study showed that female learners wrote less assertively and less argumentatively than male learners using more obscure positions. Unlike some previous studies that reported no differences, the findings illustrated how learners' social contexts and limitations may be reflected in their approach to writing in English as a foreign language.