Gender Difference Of Test Takers In College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET)

Over many years, scholars have been arguing whether there exist some kind of gender difference in the whole test or individual questions and associated mark schemes. Some researchers hold the view that this difference does exist according to some evidences that they got in the experiments they carried out. In the field of oral language proficiency test, the performances of male candidates and female candidates are also found to be different in certain ways. However, in China, such kind of study is limited. Therefore, this paper focuses on the discourse features and communication strategies that candidates applied during the whole process of College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) to examine the performance difference between male candidates and female candidates. 30 candidates are randomly selected from all who participated CET-SET in the year of 2004, who are made up of 15 girls are 15 boys. The discourses they displayed are examined in three features: overlaps, interruptions and minimal responses, which are thought to be "gendered"according to Jeniffer Coates (1993). Then the communication strategies they applied are also discussed in the taxonomy on the basis of previous work. Since candidates with different language abilities have different choices on communication strategies, this paper examines the communication strategies used by male candidates and female candidates in three different proficiency level: A, B and C, which can be deemed to have high reliability. It is found that the discourse features of overlaps and interruptions do not show a kind of gender difference; while for minimal responses, female candidates are more likely to use it. And in communication strategies, all communication strategies do not show any gender difference, except one sub-category: the backchannel cues. The results can have some implications on the teaching of the English language in classroom.