性别对第二语言习得的影响

性别对第二语言习得的影响

摘要：除了教学方法外, 有许多其他的因素会影响学习者第二语言习得。这些因素不仅智力、才能、态度和动机,而且也包括年龄、性别、民族认同和社会阶级等间接影响第二语言能力的社会因素。

关键词：性别影响

1.Introduction

When acquiring a second language, there’re many factors influence the SLA. These include internal factors as intelligence, aptitude, attitudes and motivations. In addition to the psychological factors, social factors as age, sex/gender, ethnic identity and social class also influence L2 proficiency but probably do not affect it directly.

Though the aspect of gender is much easier to define and measure than internal factors as personality, it’s not so direct to imagine how gender influences a learner’s potential for success in acquiring a second language. Whether there are some differences between male and female learners. And if there are, in what way, to what extent, male and female learners are different.

In this essay, firstly, I’ll have a look at the gender issue in SLA from the cultural aspect and the linguistic phase, after all, linguistic and language are always closely linked. Then I continue to analysize the gender factor and how it influences SLA in the classroom. Thus, we can understand why, for example, female learners are ultimately more successful than male in learning to speak a new language.

2.Literature Review

Of all the factors suggested to affect SLA, sex/ gender seems to be paid the least attention. Indeed, there is so little research in this field. The term “sex” stands for an innate biological distinction between males and females. And gender is a social one. As “gender” seems to focus on the social construction of ‘male’and ‘female’, a number of socio-linguists prefer to use this term. Labov (1991) stated, “there is little reason to think that sex is an appropriate category to explain linguistic behaviour”. He also proposed two distinct contradictory principles relating to sex differentiation in native-speaker speech.

“1.In stable sociolinguistic stratification, men use a higher frequency of non- standard forms than women.2.In the majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the incoming forms than men”(ibid.).

As some studies show, women tend to be linguistically innovative and always

surpass males in the standardness of their speech and use of prestige forms. Both principles imply that “females are superior speakers”(Penalosa, 1981; 125), and they’re likely to be more sensitive and open to new linguistic forms, incorporating them into their speech. In this way, female learners generally do better than male. Burstall (1975), who carried out a longitudinal study of some 6, 000 children beginning French at eight years old in English primary schools, found out the girls achieved higher scores than boys on all tests during the period of study.However, some studies got conflicting results. Boyle’s (1987) research of 490(257 male and 233 female) Chinese university students in Hong Kong provide findings that the boys performed better on two tests of listening vocabulary. According to Bugel and Buunk (1996), males also performed significantly better than females in a reading test that was composed of a gender-neutral passage. But, Nyikos (1990) stated in a vocabulary memorization task, the female students surpassed the men. Nevertheless, the higher incidence of successful linguists among female learners must therefore be attributed to such factors as attitudes, learning strategy and culture.

It’s not surprising that theory of gender differences got some critics from different researchers. Thus, the language strategy use should be considered because females reported more use of cognitive strategies than males (Phakiti, 2003). Although a sizable body of SILL-based research (Strategy Inventory of Language Learning) has proved that female use more learning strategies than male, little research has examined gender differences in actual strategy use in a specific L2 setting. Young and Oxford (1997) then investigated 49 (23 males and 26 females) learners in processing text in both L1 and L2. Unfortunately, they found no differences in strategy use between m ales and female. But, “they concluded that gender-based differences in strategic behaviour might not reside in general categories, but rather at the level of specific strategies. And some strategies may be gender-related”(Phakiti, 2003). As their study was situated in a non-test and low stakes reading text, “learner’s strategy use may be different because the test has a gate keeping function wherein access to certain achievement grades is restricted” (ibid.).

An alternative explanation for gender-oriented differences is ‘culture’. Maltz and Borker (1982) argued that women and men constitute different ‘gender subculture’. Female learners are more likely to be friendly and co-operative, whereas boys indicate agreement with the point being made and “emphasize establishing and maintaining hierarchical relations and asserting their identity”(Ellis, 1994). The US linguist Deborah Tannen has further developed this ‘gender as cultural difference’explanation. ‘The female ‘culture’seems to lend itself more readily to dealing with the inherent threat imposed to identity by L2 learning. Besides, females benefit from more and better input as a result of their superior listening comprehension skills, which some, males are more sensitive to input”(ibid.)There still remai n many puzzles. Why do males prove superior of having a wider listening vocabulary? While, under varying performance conditions where women are generally superior? In short, future research on sex/gender differences in SLA should be designed to fill. It should be also