Gender and Language Learning Strategies in Oral Production

Abstract

The present paper reports in summary the findings of a study conducted with University students. The research aims at identifying the type of strategies used by university students in their oral production. Furthermore, it investigates learners’ strategies use in terms of gender differences and speaking proficiency. The main research hypothesis posits that gender differences and speaking proficiency as variables influence on the strategy deployment of the learners. For ease of presentation, the following article comprises two distinctive parts. In the first section, the theoretical background of the study will be presented. The learning strategies together with the learning theories which support their use will be given primary interest. The second part of the study is practical in nature. It includes both the results and analysis of the study. To reach our goal, a descriptive quantitative approach was adopted with a sample of 50 participants from two Universities in Algeria. The elicitation tool used was a speaking test, and a strategy checklist adapted from Oxford Rebecca’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning and Cohen Andrew’s model of speaking strategies checklist (1996). The final results reveal that though no significant differences were found between male and female students in terms of their overall use of learning strategies, it is at the individual strategy level that gender differences were observed.