Gender differences in the use of oral narratives of personal experience by EFL learners

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study is to account for the oral narratives of personal experience in the interlanguage of Chilean Spanish speaking male and female learners of English. More specifically, the study intends to describe gender differences and similarities in the use of structure elements, the use of extra thematic details, and types of outcomes. The analyzed corpus consists of 30 narratives of personal experience in English. These narratives are made of 502 clauses, 289 of which were produced by male learners, and 213 were produced by female learners. The eliciting technique was a structured interview, where the informants were asked to narrate about an experience of fear of death, their happiest or saddest experience, and the most embarrassing situation they had experienced. The results confirm the presence of gender differences in the interlanguage of the Spanish speaking learners of English, which are consistent with the literature about gender differences in monolingual studies. Also, even though gendered patterns were detected, the results suggest that there is a need to account for the intragroup differences, as indications of an important internal variation was also present.