Abstract
Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robust and constant when other learner characteristics were taken into account, such as education, age of arrival, length of residence and hours studying Dutch. For reading and listening skills in Dutch, no gender gap was found. In addition, we found a general gender by education effect for all four language skills in Dutch for speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Female language learners turned out to profit more from higher educational training than male learners do in adult second language acquisition. These findings do not seem to match nurture-oriented explanatory frameworks based for instance on a human capital approach or gender-specific acculturation processes. Rather, they seem to corroborate a nature-based, gene-environment correlational framework in which language proficiency being a genetically-influenced ability interacting with environmental factors such as motivation, orientation, education, and learner strategies that still mediate between endowment and acquiring language proficiency at an adult stage.
Highlights
Contemporary handbooks on second language acquisition hardly pay attention to the role of learners’ gender
Our primary aim was to establish whether an overall gender difference exists in adult L2 acquisition, along the lines of the differences found in L1 acquisition, with females outperforming males
We used a large database with test data from more than 25,000 adult learners of L2 Dutch from 88 countries of origin with 49 different mother tongues
Summary
Contemporary handbooks on second language acquisition hardly pay attention to the role of learners’ gender (see [1,2,3,4]). A simple reason for the relative absence of research on the role of gender in L2 acquisition might be that female L2 learners doing better than male learners is regarded as being common knowledge. Perhaps Saville-Troike (2005: p.90) expresses the situation best when she critically notes: “There is widespread belief in many western cultures that females tend to be better L2 learners than males, but this belief is probably primarily a social construct, based on outcomes which reflect cultural and sociopsychological constraints and influences” [5]. Female students fared better in writing and language use (i.e. grammatical conventions, expression, spelling), while small but consistent effect sizes were found for reading and verbal reasoning. Girls develop communicative skills at a younger age than boys exhibiting larger vocabularies and using a larger variety of sentences [13,14]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
