The Writing Process: Are there any differences between boys' and girls' writing in English?

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Institutionen för pedagogik, didaktik och utbildningsstudier Examensarbete i utbildningsvetenskap, 15 hp

Rapport nr: 2012vt0073

The Writing Process

Are there any differences between boys’ and girls’ writing in English?

Rebecca Dahl

Handledare: Christine Johansson Examinator: Jörgen Mattlar

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Abstract

This essay studies the written performance of 43 Swedish junior high school students.

Relative clauses, prepositional usage and subject-verb agreement are studied and analysed in order to see what and how many errors the students make and then finally to see if there is any difference in the performance of boys and girls. Previous research in the area has shown an advantage in favour of girls and this study confirmed this. Even though the differences were not marked, the girls performed better than the boys in the majority of the cases studied. The data further indicated that there is great variation within the gender groups as well as between them.

Keywords: second language acquisition, gender differences, junior high school, learner language, written samples, corpus study, error analysis.

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1 Introduction

It is often taken for a general truth that girls are better than boys at languages and writing.

After two longer periods of teacher training and teaching English I have observed evidence that both support and repudiate this view. What I have seen in the classroom is rather a case of great variation where some boys are superior to the strongest girl in the class, and where some girls are weaker than most of the boys. I have always found so called gender based differences an interesting field of study and while it is easy to just take the common view on things as the truth it is far more interesting to investigate something on one’s own. It is my hope that this essay will shed some light on this rather unexplored field of study. I would also like to thank the students who through their writing made this study possible.

2 Background

In many western countries it is a general belief that females are better learners of a second language than men, but it is likely that this is more of a social construct than a gender-based fact. There does seem to be some gender-based differences in second language acquisition (SLA) and processing, but so far the research results are mixed (Saville-Troike 2012:90). As will be discussed later in this essay there are many theories that speak for gender differences in second language performance based on social, psychological and biological factors.

Even though the research on gender differences in SLA performance is not yet extensive there have been some studies and reports on the subject. The Swedish National Agency published a report that states that girls generally outperform boys in most school subjects and this trend is especially strong in Sweden and the Nordic countries (Skolverket 2006). Another Swedish study was made by Johansson and Geisler (2011) who looked at the writing of Swedish high school students and whether there were any differences that could be attributed to gender. They looked at the students’ syntactic maturity as an indicator of potential differences.

In this essay I will look at the writing of students of two ninth grade classes in Swedish junior high school to see if there is indeed indications of gender-based differences in their performances in the writing process, or if it is just a prejudice. I will be looking at a few different syntactic, lexical and grammatical language points in order to find this out.

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3 Literature Review

3.1 Previous Research

A 2006 report done by the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) treats gender differences in goal attainment and educational choices throughout the Swedish school system.

With regards to the nine-year compulsory school the report states that girls generally outperform boys in the majority of school subjects studied. Not least when it comes to reading comprehension are girls stronger than their male counterparts. International comparisons further show that the gap between the two genders is especially strong in Sweden and other Nordic countries (Skolverket 2006:18ff). Reading is undoubtedly connected to writing and being strong in reading is an important platform for skilled writing ability. Even though the gender difference is larger when it comes to the mother tongue, Swedish, there are still differences between the genders when it comes to knowledge of the English language (Skolverket 2006:27ff).

Johansson and Geisler (2011) have written about syntactic aspects of Swedish second language (L2) learners of English and compared the writing and syntactic maturity between different age groups in Swedish junior and senior high school. Additionally, they also addressed the question of whether there are any gender differences to be observed in the corpus data studied. In their paper they analysed 40 essays written by Swedish high school students and they looked at so-called T-units and the Subordinate Clause Index in order to distinguish any possible differences. As could be expected senior high school students wrote longer and more mature essays than the students in junior high school. There were however no real statistical differences due to gender when only a statistical analysis of clauses was made. In order to deepen the analysis of possible gender differences they looked at the pragmatic feature of stance expressions. Stance expressions would be ideas portrayed by for example I think, I believe, really etc. There were however no significant differences to be observed in relation to gender in this case either. Instead the most observable differences were once again to be observed between junior and senior high school students’ writing, i.e.

differences due to age rather than gender.

The learner’s gender connected with performance in their L2 is as mentioned above not a well-researched area of SLA. However, the common belief is that females are better than males at learning an L2. Some studies have however shown that there may be differences.

One example of a finding related to gender differences and SLA is that females tend to be better at learning and retaining complex forms while males are better at learning

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compositional rules (Saville-Troike 2012:90). Sociolinguistic research has produced conflicting results as to whether females or males perform better in their L2. Ellis (1994:202f) mentions several studies that have shown that females have performed better, but also multiple studies where males have outperformed females. There are also findings that show no difference between the genders. Ellis further refers to several studies that have shown that females tend to have a more positive attitude towards L2 learning than their male counterparts.

Some studies have also shown that females approach L2 learning in a different manner than males. An interesting example of this is that a study by Bacon referred to by Ellis (1994:202f) showed reports that men often used translation strategies, while women often monitored their comprehension more.

3.2 SLA Theory

Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which is the study of individuals’ learning and the process of learning a L2, deals with three basic questions similar to most curriculum studies theories. One tries to answer the questions What, How and Why. What does the L2 learner come to know? How does the L2 learner acquire this knowledge? And why are some learners more successful than others? There are no simple answers to these questions and people researching SLA come from a wide range of academic backgrounds and disciplines and this makes SLA a very complex field of study. There are new findings appearing on a daily basis and finding answers to these questions is of great value to anyone who teaches and/or learns one or more additional languages (Saville-Troike 2012:2).

There are multiple frameworks for the study of SLA but it can be said to be primarily based on the linguistic, psychological and social frameworks. In relation the Why-question it is primarily the psychological and social frameworks that are of greater interest as they deal with learner differences based on for example gender, social culture, aptitude and motivation.

It is however a field of research that remains fairly speculative in nature (Saville-Troike 2012:87).

Psychological factors that seem to affect successful L2 learning are aptitude and motivation. These factors are however difficult to study and it stands to reason that good aptitude and high motivation result in better L2 performance. Also personality and anxiety are factors sometimes considered, and different personality traits favour positive L2 performances.

Depending on various factors a L2 student may choose different learning strategies such as

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cognitive, metacognitive and social/affective, which represent different ways of approaching the learning process (Saville Troike 2012:90ff).

3.3 Analysing learner language

Writing is an essential productive activity for L2 learners and it is a common instrument for testing L2 knowledge. In addition, writing is very important as it contributes to effective L2 learning and it has the potential to push L2 learners closer to the limits of their present knowledge than speech can, as the learner cannot use body language and things in their immediate environment as an aid (Saville-Troike 2012:172f). When studying second language acquisition one of the main ways of research is to study how L2 learners use the language in production. The produced data collected can be of many different types and one of these is samples of learner language. By collecting and analysing samples of learner language, it is possible to study the interlanguage and the processes and factors involved in learning a new language (Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005:15). While the goal of SLA research is to describe and explain L2 competence, there is a distinction to be made between ‘competence’ and the

‘performance’ one gets when collecting samples. Despite this, Ellis & Barkhuizen (2005:21ff) claim that competence can only be studied and evaluated by analysing some kind of performance. Written language samples are the easiest to collect as they are relatively permanent and there have been large-scale projects based on written samples. It has moreover been motivated by the availability of computer-based corpora and concordance tools for analysing the samples.

An important factor when choosing learner language to be sampled is the genre.

Sampled data can be of for example argumentative or descriptive nature and the genre is likely to affect the linguistic characteristics of the essay samples. Another important factor is whether the sample produced is timed or untimed and/or whether there are reference tools available while writing (Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005:28). When the samples have been collected there are different ways of analysing the data and one of these is Error Analysis.

3.3.1 Error Analysis

L2 learners make errors in both comprehension and production. The study of errors is through error analysis (Ellis 1994:47). Error Analysis is made up of certain procedures where learner errors are identified described and explained. It is first and foremost the study of produced language, and learners’ speech and writing are studied (Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005:51). Error

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Analysis is further the first approach in SLA theory that puts the focus on actual learner errors, rather than imagined idealised linguistic structures. It focuses on L2 learners’ errors as a means of gaining insight into the learning processes and the L2 learners’ mind (Saville-Troike 2012:40f).

When setting out to do an error analysis it is of great importance that there is a clear definition of what is an ‘error’. It is often difficult to decide whether grammaticality or acceptability should be the criterion (Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005:56). Depending on what the aim of the study is one is likely to be chosen over the other.

A sample of learner language is the basis of an Error Analysis. It is important that one takes into consideration the factors that may have influenced the samples and the errors. Some of the factors that may influence the samples are learners’ proficiency level and language learning background, what genre and content the samples treat, and whether the production was planned or unplanned. After the collection of samples has been carried out there are several other steps to go through. Firstly, identification of errors where one compares what the L2 learner has produced and what a native speaker would produce in the same case. Secondly, description of errors where the L2 learners’ produced errors are explained and where one specifies how the erroneous form differs from the correct. And thirdly and maybe most importantly, explanation of errors where the sources of errors need to be determined (Ellis &

Barkhuizen 2005:57ff).

3.4 Biological and social reasons

Other reasons that have been put on the research agenda as possible reasons for a difference in academic performance between boys and girls are biological and/or social reasons. These can be attributed to the psychological and social frameworks of SLA. It is outside the scope of this essay to delve deeper into this area of study, however there is an interesting debate between nurture and nature theories and it is something that is to keep in mind whilst carrying out this limited study. Therefore I chose to briefly and objectively present some of the debate in these fields of study.

Biological reasons: It is often the case that the brains of girls mature faster than the brains of boys in the different aspects of the brain’s development. Girls often acquire verbal skills at an earlier stage, which means that girls in the initial learning stages generally read faster, have a larger vocabulary than boys and speak with better grammar. These differences are in part due to the fact that the brain’s left hemisphere, which is the side that processes language is usually better developed in females. This leads to a higher female linguistic intelligence and

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superiority in language-based learning and other language tasks (Gurian & Henley 2001:19ff).

However it is possible that the right hemisphere might be more active when it comes to L2 involvement in some multilinguals. Moreover, L2 acquisition is affected by age and research shows that there are signs of more right hemisphere development in those who learn a L2 between the age of 9 and 12 than those who learn it before the age of 4 (Saville-Troike 2007:71f). Also the report by the Swedish National Agency for Education refers to the above first mentioned and mentions biological differences as a possible explanation to why boys’

performances are weaker than girls’. Medical research repeatedly shows that the male brain develops more slowly than the female brain. Moreover the course of the brains development can differ with up to 1.5 years between an average boy and girl (Skolverket 2006:30f).

Social Reasons: Murphy and Elwood (1998:163) state that due to parents’ expectations boys and girls engage in different hobbies early in childhood and this continues as they grow up.

As a result boys and girls are exposed to different socialisation patterns and develop different ways of responding and making sense of what they experience in the world. This further influences their outlook on life and what is considered appropriate and expected behaviour.

This also affects what they learn and how they learn it. As regards language learning, there is evidence that students’ performances are strongly influences by learning outside of school and outside of the classroom. The writing style of students often corresponds with their choice of reading material outside of school. Boys often choose comics and books and articles related to their hobbies and works conveying accurate facts rather than stories. Many girls, on the other hand, like to read stories as well as works that help them understand human relations and personal problems (Gorman cited in Murphy and Elwood 1998:175).

4 Aim and Research Questions

The aim of this study is thus to see if there are any differences in the way Swedish junior high school boys and girls write in English. In order to find this out the following research questions will be treated:

 How is the written performance of Swedish junior high school students as regards their use of relative clauses, prepositions and subject-verb agreement?

 Is there a difference in junior high school boys’ and girls’ syntactic maturity, in how they successfully use relative clauses?

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 Are there differences in junior high school boys’ and girls’ writing in how they successfully use prepositions?

 Are there differences in junior high school boys’ and girls’ writing in how they successfully deal with verb forms?

5 Method and Material

In this paper I make use of 43 student essays which I had the opportunity of collecting during my teacher training period in the spring of 2012. The essays are written by students in grade nine and the students are thus 15-16 years old and have been studying English for approximately eight years. When collecting the essays, I had two lessons of 60 minutes respectively at my disposal and after a short introduction and explanation of what the essays were to be used for the students were given 50 minutes to write a short argumentative essay of approximately 200-300 words. In order to collect the essays I made use of the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC) with which it is possible for the students to easily and anonymously enter their essays in a simple web interface. ULEC is a constantly growing corpus to which student teachers make contributions each semester. The corpus makes it possible for student teachers to get authentic learner English essays that they can work with in order to analyse for example students’ writing and grammar usage (Johansson and Geisler 2010). Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that the students were working with a time-limit when they wrote their essays, which is something that might have influenced their performance somewhat. Furthermore, there were no reference tools available, but the web browser’s built-in spell-check was in function which might have influenced the results. This would however have affected the study to a higher degree if spelling had been one of the points of study, and in this study it does not play a large part. Overall I believe that the samples turned out to be fairly authentic and that the students’ essays reflected their present English knowledge-level.

The 43 essays produced by the students equal 10,524 words of text on the subject given “Do you believe in ghosts?” It is a subject expected to bring out many aspects of the students’

writing capacity in the English language. Aspects one would expect in the essays are the use of different verb tenses, such as the past tense and the conditional; conjunctions; prepositions;

and the use of main and subordinate clauses. Other noteworthy things that the essays could show are the issues word order and subject-verb agreement, as well as vocabulary register. Of

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the essays collected 18 are written by girls and 25 by boys and it can be considered a reasonably even spread.

In my analysis of the essays I study the following language aspects/points:

 Use of relative clauses

 Prepositions

 Subject-verb agreement

Each essay is individually analysed in order to extract information on the above mentioned language aspects. When analysing the essays I will be doing a partial error analysis when I look at the students’ use of prepositions and how they deal with verbs. It will be partial in the respect that not all errors will be explained. The purpose of the study is to see which gender performs the best, i.e. which gender has fewest errors, in these language categories. It is not a study of which errors students make and why they make them. It is, however, impossible to completely refrain from noting the students’ errors as they are the basis of part of the analysis.

As regards the students’ use of relative clauses, I will be looking at the occurrence of relative clauses introduced by relative pronouns and relative adverbs to see which gender has mastered this language point the best.

6 Results and Analysis

Initially, I present some basic data on the essays such as essay and sentence length. As we can see in Table 1, an initial observation is that the girls write longer essays than the boys. In the essays analysed in this study girls write on average 265.17 words compared to the boys’

230.04 words per essay. The difference is thus approximately 35 words in favour of the girls.

This does, however, not mean that the girls are better at writing than the boys. As a matter of fact, this does not tell us anything about the quality of the students’ writing. All it tells us is that the girls have the ability to write longer texts, which could be explained by different factors.

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9 Table 1 Initial data on the essays.

Girls Boys

Number of essays 18 25

Number of words produced 4773 5751

Mean essay length 265.17 230.04

Average number of sentences 17.94 11.72

Average sentence length (words) 14.78 19.63

One reason could be that girls might practice a writing style which can be described as extensive and reflective, while boys’ writing styles are more episodic and factual (Gorman cited in Murphy & Elwood 1998:175). The following examples show this difference in writing: (1) is an example of a girl’s writing that shows that she takes a reflective stance when thinking about the possible reasons to why people are fascinated by the supernatural, whilst (2) shows a boy’s concise and matter of fact style of thinking and writing.

(1) I wondered about what makes us humans so intressted in supernatural beings or things.

Those beings and thing are somthing that we are not able to reach, and maybe that is why we get so intressted. I do think that it is an escape for some people. That believing in the supernatural makes it easy. You can pretend and imagine that there is something in the world that explains everything. I think that if you can blame it on the supernatural, you do not have to figure it out by yourself. You can leave it at that, it is probably a ghost or an alien. That is the escape that I am talking about.

(female student, aged 15)

(2) I think we're fascinated by the unknown because it's something different from us. We are just normal people, we got no special "powers", why wouldn't it be interesting with people with supernatural power, like magic of some sort, or vampires?

(male student, aged 15)

It is, however, not completely correct to let only these two examples stand as the general pattern for all essays collected. There are also examples of girls who wrote essays that were straight to the point and where they did not wander off in contemplation. The same can be said for the boys’ essays. Even though it is true that many of the boys’ essays were concise, there were instances where also the boys took a more poetic path and reflected over the world we live in and whether there is a possibility the supernatural exists.

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10 6.1 Relative clauses

Johansson and Geisler (2011:143) state that relative clauses used as postmodifiers are the most reliable indicators of syntactic development. The function of the relative clause is to describe or modify the preceding noun phrase, i.e. provide additional information. A relative clause can be introduced either by a wh- relative pronoun, such as who, whom, which, whose;

by that; or by a zero-relative (Ø). It is sometimes said that the usage of wh- relative pronouns indicates a higher level since it takes more knowledge of how and when to use them. In the case of that, it is possible to use it as you please, even though it is considered to be more informal than the wh- series. In certain cases, when the relative pronoun functions as the object, it is also possible to leave out the relative pronoun in a relative clause, in these cases the zero-relative is applied (DeCapua 2008:319ff). Relative clauses can also be introduced by a relative adverb when referring to place (where), time (when) and cause (why). The use of these does however have restrictions and are often considered tautologous by many speakers (Greenbaum & Quirk 1990:367f). They do, however, occur and are therefore of interest in the analysis.

Relative clauses can often also be reduced when the relative pronoun used is who, that or which, and when it functions as the subject of the clause. There are two ways of reducing these relative clauses. Firstly, if the relative clause includes any form of the verb to be; the relative pronoun, be, and any other auxiliary can be deleted (3). A second way to reduce a relative clause is possible when the relative clause does not include a form of the verb to be.

In these cases the relative pronoun can be omitted and replaced by the verb in the present participle -ing-form (4) (DeCapua 2008:337f). A few of the students used these ways of writing which can be seen in given examples. A possible explanation for this could be that the students who participated in this study had worked with the progressive –ing form not long before the collection of data was carried out. It is common that students after learning a new grammatical rule tend to overuse the rule or aspect in question.

(3) A holiday(-) meant to think about the dead now becomes a masquerade.

[A holiday that is meant to think about the dead now becomes a masquerade]

(4) but I know in my hearts it's my mind playing tricks with me [but I know in my hearts it’s my mind that plays tricks with me]

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In some cases the students’ English was probably not advanced enough and the students used neither relative clauses nor reduced forms with the present participle. Sentence (5) is an example of a student who instead of constructing more complex sentences writes multiple short sentences. In sentence (6) I show an example of how the many sentences can be transformed into fewer, but longer and more complex, sentences by using relative pronouns and relative adverbs.

(5) Laban is a very cute ghost. If you don't know who Laban is, so can a tell you. That is a ghost in a story for children. Laban is not angry, he's kind. He have a big ghost house.

Laban lives with his family.

(6) Laban is a very cute ghost who appears in a story for children. He is not angry, he is kind. He has a big ghost house where he lives with his family.

As Table 2 shows, boys write sentences with relative clauses more often than girls. On average, boys use 2.6 relative clauses while girls use 2.39 relative clauses per essay. The difference is very small, but it is a difference nonetheless.

Table 2 Statistics on the use of relative clauses introduced by a relative pronoun or adverb in the students’ essays.

Girls Boys

Relative clauses introduced by a relative pronoun

Number of relative wh-clauses 15 22

Number of relative that-clauses 20 36

Number of relative Ø-clauses 3 3

Relative clauses introduced by a relative adverb

Number of relative where-clauses 0 2

Number of relative when-clauses 2 1

Number of relative why-clauses 3 1

Total number of relative clauses 43 65

Mean average number of relative clauses per essay 2.39 2.6

It would however be rash to claim that this finding repudiates the common view that girls perform better in written English tasks. I believe that there is great variation within the gender groups themselves and the essays showed this as well. The boy who used the highest number used nine relative clauses in his essay, and four boys used none. As for the girls the highest number of relative clauses recorded was five. Two girls made use of five relative clauses, while another two used none (see further Appendix A).

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The results of this initial language point thus show a slight advantage in favour of boys when referring to the students’ syntactic maturity in their written performance in English. The difference in the students’ performances is very small and scattered within their own gender group. In order to get a wider perspective it is of great importance to look at the remaining language points.

6.2 Prepositional usage

Prepositions is one of the word classes that Swedish students have most difficulty grasping and where much negative transfer occurs. In grade nine of Swedish junior high school students have studied prepositions of time and place as well as prepositions followed by the progressive –ing form of a verb. The students who participate in this study have used the textbook series Wings and the books for grade seven and eight cover prepositions with brief explanations and exercises (Mellerby et al. 2010a, Mellerby et al. 2010b). However, the books for grade nine do not explicitly deal with prepositions and the only thing available is a one and a half page reference page in the grammar section (Mellerby et al. 2010c). Students are expected to have a good basic grasp of prepositions already from the two previous years of schooling. Nonetheless, many of the students who participated in this study had considerable difficulties choosing the correct preposition when writing their essays. Before the students wrote the essays we had as a matter of fact dedicated an entire one hour lesson to revising prepositions and the sometimes troublesome transfer from Swedish to English. Despite this, many students still made several easy errors.

Prepositions are often a big problem for English Language learners in general. This is mainly due to the fact that there are many more prepositions in English than in other languages and learners often have to make choices that are not necessary in their own language. Prepositions consist of some of the English language’s most common words. They are often short words, such as in, at, on; but can also include longer words and short phrases, such as despite, in spite of. (Parrott 2007:83f). Most of these are also the ones that are taught in Swedish junior high school. The prepositions at, on, in, to and into often cause confusion even to learners whose first language have the equivalent prepositions since different distinctions are made in English than in other languages (Parrot 2007:85). These are indeed some of the prepositions that cause the most trouble for Swedish learners of the English language as Swedish does have equivalents but make different distinctions.

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Many verbs, adjectives and nouns take a specific preposition. This preposition often does not carry any meaning but is merely a linking word, a dependent preposition (Parrot 2007:86). Dependent prepositions is something explicitly taught in senior high school, but which many learners pick up when reading, watching and listening to English language media.

These instances of dependent prepositions also cause some problems for Swedish students as they tend to use the English preposition that corresponds to the one used in Swedish.

Before we treat any possible gender differences I would like to discuss the students’

performance as regards the prepositional usage in the essays. The usage of the prepositions at, in and on cause much confusion and hence many errors. While many prepositions can be directly translated with the Swedish equivalent and vice versa at, in and on have several equivalents in both Swedish and English and is therefore one of the first things to be observed in the student’ writing.

The topic of the essay was ”Do you believe in ghosts” and I believe this could explain why almost everyone used the correct preposition in this case. The same applies to ‘fascinated by’

which was one of the follow-up questions. Examples (7) and (8) are two of numerous examples of where students correctly used these verb + preposition combinations.

(7) No, I do not believe in supernatural phenomenoms, but I can't help but wonder sometimes.

(8) I think were so fascinated by the unknown cause people always want to proof that they have experienced some kinds of spirit or vodo things.

Nevertheless, there were still errors made in these cases as can be seen in examples (9) to (11). Table 3 further shows statistics on the incorrect choice of preposition in these cases.

(9) i dont wanna believe on the supernatural because it a bit verd (male student, aged 15)

(10) I think we are so fascinated about it becouse we can't found out anything about it until your dead.

(11) The reason to why we are fascinated of supernatural things is that it is something new and exciting which we have not seen before.

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Table 3 Statistics on the number of students who attached an incorrect dependent preposition after ‘believe’ and ‘fascinated’ respectively.

Girls Boys

Number of students attaching an incorrect preposition after ‘believe’ 0 2 Number of students attaching an incorrect preposition after

‘fascinated’

1 4

Of potential interest in these cases is that ‘believe on’ were only found in the boys’ essays while all girls used this dependent preposition correctly. As for cases where an erroneous dependent preposition was attached to the verb ‘fascinated’, the errors were once again made by the boys, while a single girl also made an erroneous choice of preposition, adding about instead of by.

It would be interesting to know how many students would have made the error of writing ‘believe on’ and ‘fascinated of’ had it not been included in the essay topic. Especially since a significant number of correct prepositions were instances of these two. It is only natural to reply to a question of “Do you believe in...” with “I believe/don´t believe in...”

Moving on, when the students had to choose the correct preposition there were significantly more errors. Especially in cases where they make a direct transfer of the Swedish form. The negative transfers from Swedish often occurred in cases where there is a set adjective/verb + preposition combination as can be seen in examples (12)-(17) below.

(12) We was scared for the dark (scared of the dark) Sw: rädd för

(13) It´s something special with Halloween (special about Halloween) Sw: speciellt med

(14) a window for example just can open up of its own. (open on its own) Sw: öppna upp av sig själv

(15) I have always been intrested of everything thats can (interested in everything) conect with ghost and stuff.

Sw: intresserad av (female student, aged 15)

(16) I think that we people don't be so afraid for them (afraid of them) because the ghostes can not hurt you.

Sw: rädd för

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(17) My mother mother read the book for me al the time (read the book to me) Sw: läsa för

These errors explained above that could be attributed to negative transfer were quite evenly distributed between the genders, with both groups producing many errors.

Another mistake that occurred a few times was the combination of for...ago as in (18) and (19). This would correspond to the Swedish ‘för...sedan’ which is a combination that cannot be transferred into English. In English, one would only use the preposition ago as a means of explaining something that happened in the past.

(18) In the past like for a 300 years ago they belived in whiches and burned many people especial womans and girls.

(19) people that believed in these matters for some hundred years ago (male student, age 16)

There were also quite a few instances where the students used prepositions where there would be no need for one neither in Swedish nor English and where the error cannot be attributed to negative transfer between Swedish and English. I believe this could be the influence of other languages as quite a few of the students have foreign family backgrounds and for whom Swedish is not their native language. I will not make a description of these errors as I have no means of explaining why they were made. These errors have been noted and counted towards the complete statistics of the study to see a possible difference between the genders.

Table 4 Statistics on the use of prepositions and prepositional errors.

Girls Boys

Number of prepositions in the essays 257 336

Mean average of number of prepositions used per essay 13.3 13.4

Number of prepositional errors in the essays 33 53

Mean average of prepositional errors per essay (percentage) 13.5 19.2 Table 4 above shows that boys and girls use roughly the same number of prepositions in their essays, that is 13.3 prepositions per essay for girls and 13.4 prepositions per essay for boys.

However, Table 4 also shows that, despite having knowledge of when and how to use a preposition, boys have a tendency to choose the wrong preposition more frequently than girls.

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The error ratio for boys is 19.2% and can be compared with the girls’ lower 13.5% ratio, which shows a whole 5.7 percentage unit difference in favour of the girls.

However, it is also the case that while girls are more even in their written performance, the boys show considerable differences. In the essays studied, girls chose the wrong preposition in 5.9-38.5% of the cases while the boys made an erroneous choice of preposition in 11.5-75% of the cases (see Appendix B). In Table 5 below we can see that, in addition to this, only three out of 18 girls’ essays were error free while seven out of 25 boys made no errors as regards prepositional usage. In other words, only 16.7% of the girls’ essays were error free while a whole of 28% of the boys managed to write an essay without prepositional errors. This shows that there is in fact greater variation within rather than between the genders.

Table 5 Statistics on students without any prepositional errors.

Girls Boys

Number of students without any prepositional errors 3 7

Percentage of students without any prepositional errors 16.7 28

6.3 Ability to use subject-verb agreement correctly

I also studied how the students’ grasp of correct subject-verb(S-V) agreement is. It is primarily in the present simple that subject-verb agreement is practiced. When conjugating verbs in the present simple one needs to make a distinction between verbs referring to a third person singular subject and verbs with other subjects. When the verb refers to a third person singular subject it is obligatory to:

- add an –s or –es to verbs in the present tense

- use is in the present tense and was in the past tense the verb to be - use has for the verb to have

The addition of –s is often called ‘the third person s.’ Many English language students tend to forget this ‘third person s’ even when they have attained a relatively high competence in the language. Many learners also find the present simple forms used to ask questions and to make negative statements confusing and continue to make mistakes throughout their language studies (Parrot 2007:153ff). Estling Vannestål (2007:80f) suggests that another reason why learners make mistakes with S-V agreement is that the principle has been misunderstood.

Learners sometimes think that if you add a plural –s to the noun you should add an –s to the

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verb as well. For example ‘the girls jumps’ as well as the opposite ‘the girl jump’. The phenomenon of errors regarding the third person -s has been treated by Källqvist & Petersson (2006) who studied samples of Swedish high school students’ writing and found that it is something that causes great difficulty for many. It is both due to influence from the Swedish language and due to the fact that there is inconsistency in the grammatical rules regarding the use of the third person -s.

In this study I looked at how the students conjugated verbs in:

- the present simple - the past perfect tense - constructions with do - past tense of the verb to be

I did not consider cases where the students used:

- the imperfect (except for cases with the verb ‘to be’ which can be conjugated in the imperfect tense as well),

- the conditional - future reference

- constructions with the auxiliary verbs can and may

The reason for this is that the conjugation of the verb using the above does not change depending on who or what one refers to. Whether one refers to one single girl or a several girls does not matter, the verb will take the same form regardless, e.g. ‘the girl jumped to the left’ while ‘the three girls jumped to the right’.

S-V agreement is one of the first things taught when studying English grammar. One would then think that the students should have mastered this after many years of English language instruction, but one would be mistaken as there were quite a few errors made in the students’

essays. Since it is the third person singular form of regular verbs in the present tense that differs, this is where many of the errors found occurred when students referred to for example friends or words ending with –thing/–one/-body, as can be seen in examples (20)-(23).

(20) When the spotlight light up the sky it sometimes look like a big round spaceship (male student, aged 15)

(21) He jump very high and he fly (female student, aged 16)

(22) i think everything have an explanation.

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18 (23) Nobody know if supernatural exist

There were also instances of the opposite where the student would add an –s to plural subjects as well. Example (24) illustrates how the student has added both the plural –s and the third person –s. (25) is an example where the third person -s that is only supposed to be used to refer to a singular third person subject is added to a verb referring to a third person plural subject.

(24) Kids believes in monsters and supernatural powers because of the cartoons they watched on TV which in my opinion isn't that good.

(25) In Mexico they celebrates the judgement of the death (male student, aged 16)

As for agreement in the past tense there were notable errors as well. Example (26) is one of many where the students use was instead of were to refer to themselves and friends in the past tense. Example (27) illustrates an error that students have made in the present tense as well as in sentences where ‘people’ is the subject. ‘People’ was in many cases treated as a third person singular. This may be attributed to the fact that ‘people’ is sometimes seen as an entity, much like ‘family’.

(26) We was scared for the dark because we thought that ghost can came up and scream you.

(27) I don't believe that there are people that hasn't gone over to "the other side".

Table 6 Statistics on the use of verbs and S-V agreement

Girls Boys

Mean average of number of applicable S-V agreement cases per essay 24.89 24.88 Mean average of S-V agreement errors per essay(percentage) 5.02 11.13

Looking at Table 6 above it becomes clear that this is the language point studied that shows the greatest variation between the genders. The mean average of errors in the girls’ essays is 5.02% while the boys’ essays contain on average 11.13% agreement errors. This means that

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boys make more than twice as many S-V agreement errors compared to girls. Just as with prepositional usage there are a number of students who made no agreement errors at all.

However, contrary to the results of prepositional usage, Table 7 below shows that the girls maintain their advantage toward the boys: almost twice as many girls as boys write essays free of agreement errors. Seven of the girls’ and five of the boys’ essays remained error free after the analysis of the essays was done, and keeping in mind that the number of essays written by boys were more numerous than the number of essays written by girls; this means that 38.9% of the girls’ essays were error free, which is almost twice as many as the 20%

error free essays written by boys. The results within the groups are also more even in the study of this language point. The spread for the girls who had made agreement errors is 2.3- 14.3% and the error ratio for boys is 2.2-33.3% (see further Appendix C).

Table 7 Statistics on students without any S-V agreement errors.

Girls Boys

Number of students without any S-V agreement errors 7 5

Percentage of students without any S-V agreement errors 38.9 20

This language point shows that girls have developed their grasp of S-V agreement better than boys, and they outperform the boys both on the wider group level as well as the narrower point where the number of error free students in the different gender categories are considered.

6.4 Bringing the different language points together

I have studied different language points and discussed them independently from each other. I will here try to tie the different categories together to see whether there are any differences between the genders and if the frequently expressed opinion that girls are better than boys at writing and languages is true or not in this case. Table 8 shows which gender performed better in the respective language points studied.

Table 8 Language points studied and the gender group that performed best.

Language point Favoured gender

Use of relative clauses Boys

Use of prepositions Girls

Subject-Verb agreement Girls

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After having analysed 43 student essays there seems to be a slight advantage for the female gender. Of the three language points studied they performed better in two. However, in the first two points studied, the performance was very even and one really has to look hard to detect any notable differences. Especially, differences in the use of relative clauses were near to non-existent. As for prepositional usage a first glance showed a significant advantage for girls on a surface level, but once we look at individual performances more boys than girls produce essays without prepositional errors. As for S-V agreement it is the only language point that gives girls an advantage over boys in all aspects studied. The error ratio is lower overall and a higher number of girls write error free essays in this respect.

Summing up, this study shows that in the language points studied girls are better than boys at writing in English, but the difference is not very large and there seems to be great variation within the gender groups as well.

7 Discussion

As this study has been focused on the written language performance of the students rather than the reasons behind the fact that girls indeed do seem to perform better than boys this brief discussion will, as much previous research in the area, be of a fairly speculative nature. I have not had the possibility to study neither the students’ biological nor social conditions, and much of the previous research in the field has attributed gender differences to these factors.

7.1 The results are in favour of the girls as a group

As presented in the background and literature review sections, it is the general belief in western culture and the SLA research community that females are better language learners than males. The results of this study have shown to be in agreement this view and previous research in the field in most points studied. The girls outperformed the boys in all fields except the use of relative clauses. Girls as a group wrote longer essays, made fewer prepositional errors as well as fewer S-V agreement errors.

The reason for girls performing better than boys is still unclear but could be attributed to all of the perspectives previously discussed. One reason could be that which neorolinguists and spokespersons for biological differences believe in. It has indeed been scientifically researched that the left hemisphere, which is where language is processed, is better developed in girls which gives girls a so-called natural advantage over boys. It could also be due to the social context in which the students live and have lived in. The report by Skolverket (2006)

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showed that the girls were outperforming boys in most subjects studied and that this was especially strong in Sweden and the Nordic countries. The question one has to ask oneself then is whether the biological differences are only to be attributed to gender differences because as the report shows there is also a difference between girls and boys in the north of Europe and girls and boys in other countries. Should one then consider race an important factor as well and that race combined with gender differences is a more decisive factor?

However, it seems more likely that social reasons can be applied to the fact that there is variation between as well as within the two gender groups. This will be discussed next.

7.2 Intragroup rather than intergroup variation

Even though the results have shown to be in advantage of the female gender, I also observed much data that point to variation within the different gender groups as well as variation between them. When the prepositional usage was analysed it gave two sides to the story as it initially showed that the girls made fewer errors than boys, but when I looked at the number of students that made no errors at all the boys were at an advantage.

The explanation to this variation is most likely to be found in other areas of study which fall into the psychological and social frameworks of SLA study. In this study it has not been possible to research the students’ contact with and interest in the English language. It is however not unlikely that there are many of the high performing boys who have great aptitude and motivation towards their language studies. As I have spent a significant amount of time with the students who participated in this study I have knowledge that has not been accounted for in this study. I do however happen to know that many of the boys in these two classes spend a significant amount of time online playing games and chatting with people around the world. This means that they are exposed to and use English outside of the classroom as they have something that motivates them to continue using the language. And as we all know, when we use a language we continuously develop it.

8 Conclusion

In this essay I have studied the writing of 43 students of Swedish junior high school. I have looked at three different language points and studied the performances. As regards relative clauses the occurrence was studied, and in the case of prepositions and subject-verb agreement the amount and type of errors they made in the respective categories was studied.

In addition, I studied which gender used more relative clauses and which gender made the

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highest amount of prepositional and agreement errors in order to see if there were any observable differences. The study showed an advantage in favour of the girls’ writing and the results are therefore in agreement with much previous research in this field of study. For clarity’s sake I will now briefly address and answer my four research questions one last time.

The first research question “How is the written performance of Swedish junior high school students as regards their use of relative clauses, prepositions and subject-verb agreement?” was of a more general nature and was treated throughout the data presentation and analysis section together with the more specific research questions. The students’

performances were varying and showed variation between as well as within the two gender groups.

The second research question was “Is there a difference in junior high school boys’ and girls’ syntactic maturity, in how they successfully use relative clauses?” and the results showed that there is a small difference. The boys successfully used relative clauses introduced by relative pronouns and relative adverbs more often than girls. Nonetheless, there was great variation within the gender groups as well.

The third research question “Are there differences in junior high school boys’ and girls’

writing in how they successfully use prepositions?” showed that the girls used correct prepositions more often than boys. Prepositions is a word class that causes much confusion for L2 learners and it seems that the ninth-grade girls who participated in this study have been able to master their usage to a higher extent than boys. However, this is mainly on a group level and as soon as I considered individual performances the results showed that more boys than girls wrote essays without prepositional errors. This means that also this language point showed great variation between as well as within the gender groups.

The fourth and last research question “Are there differences in junior high school boys’

and girls’ writing in how they successfully deal with verb forms?” was the one that showed the most notable differences between the genders. The girls outperformed the boys both as a group and on an individual level.

As this study was of a very limited kind it was only possible to study a few language points. It would have been very interesting to have considered other language points in order to be able to give a fuller picture and more points of comparison. As the study stands now only three aspects were studied and the girls only performed slightly better than the boys. It would for example be interesting to study the choice of vocabulary or in a freer writing task the choice of topic. Would girls choose to write more about emotional and reflective topics, or would it

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instead be the boys that would choose more profound topics rather than writing about games and comics?

Many of the theories behind differences in performance rely on social and psychological factors. It would therefore be of great interest to a future study to combine analysis of the students' written performance with interviews to try to explain why some students perform well and others do not. As I mentioned in the discussion I know many of the students who participated in this study and I have some knowledge of their interests and social and linguistic backgrounds. Through an extended study with interviews it would be possible to study the students’ written performance together with factors such as motivation, interests and social conditions.

Finally, L2-learning in relation to gender is still a rather unexplored field of study and much more research can and needs to be made before we can form any real theories to whether, and if so why, females are better L2 learners than males. There are many aspects to study and I hope that there will be answers found in the future as it is a fascinating subject. It will further have the prospect of influencing SLA teaching methods as background knowledge of why students perform well or not can help the teacher design lesson plans and activities that favour the students.

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References

DeCapua, Andrea. 2008. Grammar for Teachers: A guide to American English for Native and Non-Native Speakers. Boston: Springer

Ellis, Rod. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ellis, Rod & Gary Barkhuizen. 2005. Analysing Learner Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Estling Vannestål, Maria. 2007. A University Grammar of English – with a Swedish Perspective. Lund: Studentlitteratur

Greenbaum, Sidney & Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student’s Grammar of the English Language.

Harlow: Longman

Gurian Michael & Patricia Henley. 2001. Boys and Girls Learn Differently! A Guide for Teachers and Parents. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Books

Johansson, Christine & Christer Geisler. 2009. “The Uppsala Learner English Corpus: A New corpus of Swedish high school students’ writing” In Saxena Anju & Åke Viberg (eds.) Multilingualism: Proceedings of the 23rd Scandinavian conference of linguistics.

Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

Johansson, Christine & Christer Geisler. 2011. “Syntactic Aspects of the Writing of Swedish L2 Learners of English.” To appear in Newman, John; Rice, Sally & Harlad Baayen (eds.) Corpus-based Studies in Language Documentation, Use, and Learning.

Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Källqvist, Marie & Sandra Petersson. 2006. ”An s, or not an s; that is the question: Swedish teenage learners’ explicit knowledge of subject-verb agreement in English” In Einarsson,

Jan; Larsson Ringqvist, Eva & Maria Lindgren (eds.) Approaches to teaching and learning in linguistic research: Papers from the ASLA symposium in Växjö, 10-11 November 2005.

Mellerby, Anna; Rinnesjö, Susanna; Glover, Mary; Glover, Richard; Hedberg, Bo & Per Malmberg. 2010a. Wings 7 Blue: Workbook. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur.

Mellerby, Anna; Rinnesjö, Susanna; Glover, Mary; Glover, Richard; Hedberg, Bo & Per Malmberg. 2010b. Wings 8 Red: Workbook. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur.

Mellerby, Anna; Rinnesjö, Susanna; Glover, Mary; Glover, Richard; Hedberg, Bo & Per Malmberg. 2010c. Wings 9 Black: Workbook. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur.

Murphy, Patricia & Jannette Elwood. 1998. ‘Gendered learning outside and inside school:

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influences on achievement’ in D. Epstein, J. Elwood, V. Hey & J. Maw (eds.) Failing Boys? Issues in gender and achievement. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Parrott, Martin. 2007. Grammar for English Language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Saville-Troike, Muriel. 2012. Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Skolverket. 2006. Könsskillnader i måluppfyllelse och utbildningsval. Rapport 287.

Stockholm: Tabergs Tryckeri.

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Appendixes

Appendix A Data on age, number of words, number of sentences, number of relative clauses, percentage of Subject-Verb agreement errors and percentage of prepositional errors for each student’s essay

Student (M) Age Words Sentences

Relative clauses

Subject-Verb agreement errors (%)

Prepositional errors (%)

AM1 16 272 13 4 0 18.80

AM2 15 201 9 1 0 0

AM3 15 237 18 2 31.6 19

AM4 15 260 11 9 20.7 0

AM5 15 94 7 0 8.3 75

AM6 15 101 7 1 0 0

AM7 16 224 7 2 12.1 33.30

AM8 15 118 8 0 33.3 37.50

AM9 15 205 15 1 23.1 23.50

AM10 15 170 7 0 18.2 50

AM11 16 210 10 2 32.1 0

AM12 15 104 7 1 14.3 28.60

AM13 15 206 16 4 15.8 0

AM14 15 248 7 2 12 18.80

AM15 15 402 22 6 0 21.10

CM1 15 225 14 4 8.3 21.40

CM2 15 228 8 4 12.1 33.30

CM3 15 284 2 5 4.4 21.40

CM4 15 294 20 4 4.2 0

CM5 16 275 15 3 5 19

CM6 15 209 10 1 2.2 14.30

CM7 16 352 15 7 10.3 11.50

CM8 15 260 11 0 0 18.20

CM9 16 323 20 1 2.8 0

CM10 15 249 14 1 12.5 15

Total 5751 293 65 283.3 479.70

Mean Average 230.04 11.72 2.6 11.33 19.2

The Writing Process: Are there any differences between boys' and girls' writing in English?