Gender differences in vocabulary acquisition in the foreign language in primary educationEvidence from lexical errors

Résumé

The present work deals with the examination of gender differences in lexical error production in foreign language writing. Differences were explored both from a quantitative perspective and also from a qualitative one. Existing literature on gender differences in the processes of foreign language acquisition has focused on differences in reading comprehension, learning strategies, or vocabulary use, but the field of lexical errors has only been addressed scarcely, especially in primary education contexts. Moreover, these studies throw inconclusive and contradictory results. We found that male and female students commit similar percentages of lexical errors in their writings, so that their compositions had similar degrees of lexical accuracy ratio. Likewise, from a qualitative point of view, our results show lack of significant differences in the type of lexical errors produced by girls and boys. From our results we can conclude that male and female foreign language learners follow similar paths of vocabulary acquisition, at least at the early stages of this process are concerned.