Gender Differences Of Chinese College Students' (Non-English Majors) In The Use Of Hedges

Back to 17^th and 18^th century, numbers of scholars found some different language forms between men and women's speech, which ignited the study of gender and language. Linguists, psychologists and sociolinguists carried out a wide variety of study to explore the impact of the variable---gender on language. Inspired by their findings, individual differences in English teaching and learning have become a hot topic. On the other hand, hedge is also an essential part of language learning. Yet the significance of hedge learning has just been recognized in the past a few decades. Meanwhile, the field of English learning has seen a newly emerged interest in the study of hedges. But the gender difference in hedge area is still scarce. The author chooses the ground where the three areas (EFL, Gender study and hedge study)meet the gender differences of hedges in English learning and tries to explore whether significant gender differences exist in using hedges among non-English majors in China.This study was conducted on the theoretical basis of pragmatic linguistic theories. Besides, sociolinguistic theories of gender differences and language were also taken into consideration in the present study because these theories may give support to the interpretation of gender differences in hedges use.The subjects in this study were selected from three cities (Beijing, Xi'an and Chongqing) in China. They were composed of 80 non-English majors (sophomores), 40 male subjects and 40 female subjects. The data mainly came from the subjects'compositions. In the compilation of the corpora, the students were required to write a composition of a given title. The data were processed by the Statistical Program for Social Sciences software (SPSS15.0 for Windows) after collection.Through statistical analysis, the following results were obtained: 1) Statistic gender difference does not exist in the use of hedges among the subjects in general; 2) Obvious differences exist in adaptor and attribute shield; 3) Statistic difference does not exist in rounder and plausible shield.Pedagogical implications were suggested that it was necessary to implement object-oriented hedges training. And it is hoped that more research should be done in this area in order to facilitate foreign language teaching and learning in China.