Abstract

In this study an attempt was made to explore possible variation between male and female primary school students’ writing in English as a foreign language. It aims at a) identifying the relationship between gender and discourse genre, b) describing the various ways in which male and female students use language to write a text, c) recording possible differences between male and female students’ written texts at a text, sentence and word level, d) exploring the cues employed in gendering primary school students based on their written texts. The study was conducted through the two following stages: Ιn the first stage of the study, 220 Greek speaking 6th grade students (110 boys, 110 girls, M=11.6 years-old, SD=0.45) from primary schools in Greece and in Cyprus participated. Five text genres were given to the students to select and cope with. In the second stage of the study, 20 student teachers (10 men and 10 women) were assigned to judge these texts for masculinity/femininity. Furthermore, the student teachers were interviewed to clarify their judges. The results extracted from the textual analysis indicated significant differences between boys and girls in the genre selection, lexical features, as well as they highlighted gender – related features in the content of the texts. The results of the second stage of the study revealed that there were no significant differences between male and female judges in inferring writers’ sex through their texts and in adopting certain criteria to justify their judgments.