Gender differences in emotional content of efl written narratives

Abstract

Gender’s trace in the use of language, although not evidently, is commonly present in all classroom situations. It is commonly believed that women are expressive and emotional, while men are self-asserting and power-oriented in the use of language. The present study, in adopting an empirically-supported approach to the negative and positive emotional content of the narrative autobiographical reports, concentrated on 103 female and 82 male graduate EFL students' writing. The collected written data were then analyzed by on-line language processing programs for emotional linguistic content. Although statistical analysis did not offer significant differences across genders, the data do show a slight tendency on the females' part to use a higher rate of emotional words. The results, while not very revealing in statistical terms, can point to a growi ng trend of equality, especially among the academically educated population in contexts like Iran as a Middle Eastern country. Implications of the study are discussed in the light of the literature, and theoretical background.