Gender Differences In Choice Of Topics And Genre Features Of College Students' Writing

Although English writing has received great recognition in recent decades,it still remains to be a weak area in students' overall language abilities.Scholars agree that many individual differences affect the learning processes and results in second language learning,but gender differences as a very important variable are somehow ignored.A large number of studies focus on the relationship among language learning strategies and gender,motivation of learning and gender,but in writing,the study between the choice of topics and gender,genre features and gender is seldom found.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a research about gender differences in choice of topics and genre features of college students' writing.This thesis focuses on gender differences in English writing by non-English major students through theories in sociopsycholinguistics,sociology and psychology.The methods of questionnaire and text analysis are employed in this thesis.The subjects of the research are 62 freshmen of non-English majors from the same two writing classes at a university in the northwestern mainland China.The 30 male students and 32 female students were taught by the same teacher,the same teaching contents and methods were used.The questionnaire investigated gender differences between the students' interest and their preferable topics,and the related data were analyzed with SPSS18.0.In addition,their narrative and argumentative essays in the form of timed writing were analyzed.The results of the study showed that male and female students choose different topics according to their own interests and hobbies.And most female students prefer to use emotion adjectives,while male students seldom use the first and second person to express their own opinions.In addition,most female students are good at deductive organization,but male students tend to adopt the inductive organization.The study indicates that gender differences are significant in the choice of topics and genre features of college students' writing.It is also a new attempt to analyze gender differences in English writing among non-English major college students,and it makes up for some deficiencies of other studies.In addition,the research enriches some teaching theories and practices for non-English majors.It is suggested that teachers can combine the foreign language teaching with the study of gender to improve the quality of students' English writing.