NATURE OR NURTURE? A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN SECOND AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

One of the most well-known “gendered” aspects of second and foreign language acquisition is probably that language is a “female subject”, which implies females tend to perform better than males in language learning. While research on gender in second and foreign language learning is wide-ranging, the findings of previous studies have been inconclusive and inconsistent. It is generally observed that the effects of gender are not always apparent, but always present. As the gender/sex variable does not often exert influence in isolation, this paper aims to analyze how gender has been explored in the literature in relation to other individual and group differences and how they interact to shape the process of second and foreign language acquisition.