Gender and L1 Influence on EFL Learners’ Lexicon

Abstract

The words we use are a gate into our mind and as such uncover patterns of thought including ideological ways of thinking. They also become necessary tools for mental processes, such as forming relationships and analogies, ordering, classifying and distinguishing (Arribas, 2003:1), and reflect our educational background. For (Arribas, 2003:4), the learning of a second language is a cultural rather than a natural (that is, biological) process and, thus, it is only logical to think that different foreign language learning contexts may have an influence on the inter-language of learners from diverse countries and mother tongues. This language learning process results in specific features in the performance of second language learners due to these idiosyncratic factors. On the other hand, a certain degree of similarity is expected among all learners of the same second language due to diverse sociolinguistic egalitarian processes such as globalization, a natural sequence of SL development (Ellis, 1985:71), genre conventions or social roles, just to mention a few. These opposing forces must be necessarily reflected on the learners’ lexical competence, which would display similarities and differences derived from the common characteristics they share (such as age, sex, educational background, or type of task required) and the distinctive features they possess (such as L1 background or L2 proficiency). Thus, the purpose of this study is to contrast the lexicon used in texts written by university students, focusing on the variables of gender and first language background, as contrasted with a reference group of English native speakers of equivalent sociolinguistic characteristics.