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تسجيل

LANGUAGE AND GENDER Boys and girls

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P50-C2

2026-07-21

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LANGUAGE AND GENDER

Boys and girls

A somewhat similar interest in sex differences (particularly in the earlier years) requires applied linguists to study language achievement by boys and girls – by language achievement here is meant second/foreign-language learning as well as schooled literacy in the mother tongue or L1, by which here we mean the school language, understood as the medium of instruction in all areas of the school work. Just as in the studies mentioned above, the common finding here is that females are ahead: girls do better than boys in all verbal areas of the school. The explanation typically offered is that girls are more verbal than boys, that this is hard-wired into the brain: indeed it is curious that the ubiquity of this explanation for what goes on in schools does not reach over into those other areas of male–female differences. I suggested that there was really no need for an explanation – that noting the difference was enough, but even so it is surprising that the explanation of achievement differences, the view that females are more verbal is not used to explain why females are more advanced in language change.

Applied linguists have certainly taken a keen interest in this school difference between boys and girls: and it must be stressed (and it is worth doing so because it acts as a distinguisher of the interest between linguists and applied linguists) that their reason for that interest is not that they are primarily interested in the language of boys and girls but that they are interested in how boys and girls use language so that they can take action to improve the teaching and learning of both groups or to facilitate intercommunication between boys and girls.