A Sociolinguistic Study On Features Of Second-Language Female Learners’Speech

In the early17th century, some scholars found the difference of language use between male and female. Therefore, they began to study the relation between language and gender. In1975, the publication of Lakoff’s Language and Womens Place attracted world-wide attention, which also symbolizes the beginning of gender study. Linguists, psychologists and sociolinguists have studied the influence of gender on language use from the perspective of phonology, vocabulary and so on. Taking English native speakers as her subjects, Lakoff (1975) concluded ten features of female language use. Based on Lakoff’s claims, this study takes Chinese second language learners as subjects, gender and the linguistic competence (CET6) as variables, and tries to explore whether there exists gender difference in ESL in China with the help of hypothesis testing method.The data of this thesis is collected through tape-recording and a questionnaire. Moreover, through the use of Statistical Program for Social Science Software (STATA12.0for Windows), this thesis thoroughly analyzes and studies the data. Firstly, there is enough evidence to show that female ESL learners demonstrate distinctive uses in English because of their genders.1) expletives,"oh, dear and oh, my goodness" are women’s preferences;2) approbation or admiration adjectives,"adorable, lovely and sweet" are used mostly by women;3) topic selection vary greatly in women’s language (fashion/shopping, food and drinks, family and emotion and gossiping are frequently used by women);4) hedges are different between genders (Compared with males, females use less "you know, you mean and really", while male’s use of "you know" have the tendency of imposition and females use "maybe" more than males). Secondly, female ESLs demonstrate distinctive uses in English because of their linguistic competence, for example, super-polite forms (The use of "or" is the typical example), telling jokes and the discrimination of precise color terms. The higher the subjects*linguistic competence is, the more they use super-polite forms, telling jokes and precise color terms. This thesis also tries to explain the reason of the differences above from the perspectives of sociolinguistics of linguistic competence and gender.This thesis takes Chinese ESL learners as the subjects and emphasizes on the features of second-language female learners by comparing the difference between male and female second-language learners. At the same time, it provides evidence and empirical statistics to support Lakoff s claims and has significance in enriching the study of the relationship of language and gender as well in second language teaching.