Girls’ and Boys’ Lexical Availability in EFL

Abstract

AbstractIn the present study we report research conducted with female and male students who were learning English as EFL in the 6th grade of Spanish primary education (end of this educational stage). Our main objective was to ascertain whether there were differences or similarities regarding the number and the kind of words produced by male students compared to those produced by female students in response to cue words from a lexical availability task. Highly significant differences were found in the average number of words produced by the two sexes. Girls achieved higher means than boys for each of the fifteen cue words contained in the lexical availability task.