Gender Differences In Chinese Undergraduate Students' Oral English Output

As one important social factor, gender really affects linguistic behavior at a rather high degree. Research on gender-based differences in using language has been done in fields like linguistics, psychology, sociology. Actually, sociolinguistic literature has got much evidence for gender differences in using language, including Thorne's(1975) analysis basing on social factor, Coates'(1993) interpretation of communicative competence and Chinese scholar Zhang Ping's (2002) research on different gender's language learning strategies and so on. Scholars have enlarged their research from single language variable to the expression in specific context, and the studying methods have more kinds and ways. But the focus is mainly on communities of native speakers or monolinguistic situations, it is still rare to do some research on the gender-related differences of conversation styles existing in second language learners especially the English learners of our country.On the basis of the previous studies done by scholars abroad and at home, a questionnaire survey and a tape-recorded data analysis on students'oral practice are conducted in this thesis to study gender-linked conversation styles of undergraduates in China. Through the theory of Conversation Analysis, a systematic analysis is made to find out the gender differences in terms of topic choices, amount of speech, turns and floors, interruption, back channel responses and conversational self-repair. After analysis of the data, we get the following findings: the undergraduate students show similar conversational styles to native speakers at a certain degree. The female students'oral output has the feature of supportiveness and cooperation: they are more sensitive to and care about the right expression and the truth and coherence of information than male student; and they usually make more amount of speech than the males; they make more self-repair and back channel responses than the male students. Oppositely, male students'language has the feature of assertiveness and competitiveness; they usually tend to interrupt more often than the female students do. What is more, topic choices and the ratio of male to female members in one group also play an important part in the linguistic output of the two genders. This thesis will also try to give the reason that may explain the different conversation styles between male and female students from social and cultural factors. The significance of the survey result is of two folds: firstly, it gives insights into the gender-based conversation styles of the Chinese undergraduates; secondly, it gives a very effective organization of oral English activities to help both male and female students have equal chances to practice oral English and develop their communicative competence.