Gender and Attitudes towards English Language Teaching in China

Abstract

Many researches have studied the gender differences in language learners’ attitudes towards language learning, but very few of them paid attention to their attitudes towards language teaching. Given that students were main part of the class and all teaching activities should be students-centered, thus the present study adopted a large-scale questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese English learners’ different perceptions of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a Lingual Franca (ELF) and gender differences in second language learners’ attitudes towards the English language teaching methods used in China’s university. In the study, a total of 50 students who just graduated from the university were asked to complete the questionnaires and 44 were valid (21males and 23 females). The results indicated that both male and female students had a clear recognition of the difference between EFL and ELF, and there was no significant difference between male and female students’ attitudes towards the English language teaching methods used in class. All of them thought that communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning, the two second language teaching methods were more suitable to English language teaching in China’s university. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of L2 learners’ attitudes for English language education and the methods and approaches of English language teaching used in class.