Does gender influence task performance in EFL? Interactive tasks and language related episodes

Abstract

There are differences in the way males and females use language (Aries, 1976; Ross-Feldman, 2005, 2007). However, the role that gender plays in second language acquisition (SLA) does not seem to have been studied in depth. This factor is fundamental for the Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996), as interaction opportunities have been claimed to depend on gender (Ross-Feldman, 2005, 2007). This paper aims to investigate whether gender influences conversational interaction and whether different communicative tasks have an impact on the type of interaction matched (male-male and female-female) and mixed (male-female) gender dyads engage in. The results showed that type of dyad did not influence the incidence of language related episodes (LREs) when pairs work on specific tasks, that the different tasks influence the learner’s production of LREs and that most LREs were resolved correctly.