Effects Of Gender Pairing On Junior High School Students' English Language-Related Episodes In Collaborative Reading

According to the current Teaching Syllabus issued in 2011,students are not only required to be aware of the importance of interaction and take part into the class actively but also to learn how to establish a collaborative relationship with others.Quite a few studies abroad have shown that different gender pairing would have an influence on the LREs produced and facility value in building a collaborative relationship.However,most studies at home still focus on the different ways of interaction,neglecting the effects of gender pairing on LREs.Therefore,the present study was carried out to explore what effects gender pairing would affect LREs produced by junior high school students,in hopes of providing suggestions for helping improve the effectiveness and efficiency of English classroom teaching.The research mainly answered the following two questions:1)To what extent does gender pairing affect the production and types of language-related episodes in junior high school students' collaborative reading?2)What effect does gender pairing have on nature and outcome of language-related episodes in junior high school students' collaborative reading?The participants of the research were eighteen students of Grade eight,including nine males and nine females.The students were chosen according to the scores of five tests.They were divided into different pairs and each pair consists of two students:boy-boy,boy-girl and girl-girl and they need to finish three tasks:word-matching,summary and retell.All of their discussion would be recorded by mobile-phone and then transcribed to text for analysis.From the analysis of the data,the major findings obtained are as follows:First,gender pairing did have a significant effect on the production of language-related episodes.Male-male pairing outperformed mixed pairing and female-female pairing.From the aspect of amount,the male-male group produced the largest amount of LREs in general.Of the different tasks,the largest number of LREs were produced in word-matching task for all gender pairings.Furthermore,from the aspect of types of LREs,male-male group produced the largest amount of mechanics LREs and female-female group produced the least amount of lexical LREs after the explanation of teacher.It may due to that girls were good at learning words and had a more careful attitude than boys but boys had a better logical ability and did well in organizing passages.Second,gender pairing did have a significant effect on the outcome of language-related episodes while had little effect on the nature of language-related episodes.From the aspect of nature of LREs,all the groups,no matter of the gender,produced the largest number of continuous episodes in the tasks.Nevertheless,from the aspect of the outcome of language-related episodes,female-female pairing produced the largest amount of correctly solved episodes while male-male pairing produced the largest amount of incorrectly solved episodes.Additionally,the unsolved episodes took a large part in the mixed pairing.The reason might be that boys talked a lot during the tasks but they paid little attention to the passage.Moreover,researcher assumed that puberty might result to the least amount of LREs in mixed pairing.Finally,the students of the same sex tend to form a collaborative relationship more easily.In a word,gender did have a great effect on the discussion and the LREs produced.In the teaching of conventional activities,teachers ought to make students learn to form a collaborative relationship with others and make adjustments according to the teaching aims if necessary.The final aim was to make the discussion of students improve the learning of students.