The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents

ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 Estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada THE AVAILABLE ENGLISH LEXICON OF MALE AND FEMALE SPANISH ADOLESCENTS EL LÉXICO DISPONIBLE EN INGLÉS DE CHICOS Y CHICAS ESPAÑOLES ADOLESCENTES Rosa María Jiménez Catalán Universidad de La Rioja, Spain [email protected] Andrés Canga Alonso Universidad de La Rioja, Spain [email protected] DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 This study explores the available English lexicon of Spanish adolescents in the twelfth form. It combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the English words produced by males and females in a lexical availability task. The objectives are twofold. Firstly, we identify the number of words retrieved by each group in response to nine prompts related to learners’ realities, such as ‘Food & drink’, ‘Clothes’, ‘School’, or ‘Hobbies’. Secondly, we analyse the most frequent words retrieved by males and females to ascertain whether patterns of gender variation are observed. Overall, the results indicated more similarities than differences. A closer analysis on the means points to the absence of significant differences in the number of words produced by males and females both for the whole task and per prompt. However, differential tendencies were also observed in the ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 158 exclusive words for each group that were found in the prompts ‘Professions’ and ‘Clothes’. Key words: Gender in foreign language education, available L2 lexicon, L2 word association Este estudio analiza el léxico disponible en inglés de adolescentes españoles de 2º de Bachillerato. Combina un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de las palabras producidas por los chicos y las chicas en una tarea de disponibilidad léxica en inglés. La investigación tiene un doble objetivo. En primer lugar, identificar el número de palabras producidas por cada grupo en respuesta a nueve centros de interés relacionados con la vida cotidiana de los participantes, tales como: ‘Alimentos y bebidas ‘, ‘la Ropa’, ‘la Escuela’ o ‘Pasatiempos’. En segundo lugar, se analizan las palabras más frecuentes producidas por los chicos y las chicas para determinar si se observan patrones de variación de género. En general, los resultados muestran más similitudes que diferencias entre los grupos. Un análisis más detallado de los resultados apunta a la ausencia de diferencias significativas en el número de palabras producidas por los estudiantes, tanto en la prueba en su conjunto como para cada centro de interés. Sin embargo, también se observan tendencias diferenciales en las palabras que son exclusivas para cada grupo y se encuentran en los centros de interés “Profesiones” y “la Ropa”. Palabras clave: Género en la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras, léxico disponible en L2, asociación de palabras en L2 1. Introduction This study explores the mental lexicon in English as a foreign language (EFL) of a group of Spanish adolescents. It aims to contribute to gender and foreign language research by identifying and comparing the words that Spanish male and female adolescents provide in English when asked to respond to prompts related to ordinary life. The study of the words that EFL learners have in their mind can tell us about the nature of their vocabulary knowledge in the target language and about the structure of their lexicon at distinct stages of second or foreign language (L2) acquisition. It can also reveal critical issues related to gender and education, 159 Rosa María Jiménez Catalán & Andrés Canga Alonso ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 such as potential inequality of the known L2 vocabulary of male and female students in any course. Moreover, as words convey thoughts, emotions and attitudes (Chung & Pennebaker, 2007; Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003), the study of the words that EFL learners have in their mind might reveal how males and females perceive daily realities through the lens of a foreign language. However, EFL learners’ lexicon in the target language is not directly observable unless it is activated by a topic or situation. One way to obtain insights into learners’ mental lexicons is by asking them to accomplish lexical availability tasks; these are based on the association of prompts and the words generated in response to those prompts. In this regard, lexical availability tasks are also known as word availability tasks, word association tasks, semantic category tasks and word fluency tasks (see for instance, Ardila, Ostrosky-Solís, & Bernal, 2006; Martin, Lalonde & Mack., 1994; Hell & de Groot, 1988; Baumeister, 1985). Lexical availability tasks are based on the following theoretical assumptions. Firstly, words are potentially available in the mental lexicon, but are not activated unless the topic or situation requires them. Secondly, the first words that come to mind are the most readily available. Thirdly, the words retrieved may not be the most frequent words in a language, but they are the words required by the theme or topic. This is what occurs, for example, when teachers refer to the pupils, course books, notebooks, blackboard, chalk, pencils or timetables at school, or need to discuss homework, exams or marks (Jiménez Catalán & Dewaele, 2017). Despite its potential, lexical availability research on gender in foreign language education is scarce, as will be shown in the next section. At this point, it is important to clarify that we use the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ interchangeably to refer to both sex and gender, the former being traditionally understood as the biological distinction of male/female, and the latter as the attributes associated with each sex by society. In agreement with numerous scholars (Cameron, 2010; Sunderland, 2000; Coates, 2004; Pavlenko, 2004; Mills, 2002; Ehrlich, 1997), we believe that gender is a social concept that is liable to variation. For example, in the context of foreign language education, we might anticipate gender variation depending on the course and on the age of the learners. ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 160 2. The Factor of Sex/gender in the Research on SLA and L2 Lexical Availability Gender in foreign language education has rarely attracted research in second language acquisition (SLA) (Block, 2002). This situation has improved in recent decades due to the publication of monographs and seminal articles on gender in the acquisition of second or foreign languages (Elsner & Lohe, 2016; Jiménez Catalán, 2010; Agustín Llach, 2009; Carr & Pauwels, 2006; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004; Jiménez Catalán, 2003; Chavez, 2001; Sunderland, 2000). However, most of this research has aimed at the identification of discourse markers and vocabulary in narratives written by male and female second language learners in immersion contexts (Jule, 2010; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004), or at the analysis of the vocabulary used in letters and emails by male and female EFL learners in primary school contexts (Jiménez Catalán & Ojeda Alba 2008; Jiménez Catalán & Ojeda Alba 2009; Agustín Llach, 2009; Kaur, 2009). More recently, a substantial body of work that investigates the vocabulary of EFL learners by means of lexical availability tasks has emerged in SLA. As shown in Table 1, this research differs considerably concerning the target language, the country, and the educational level of the subjects. Even within the same educational level, differences are observed in the specific form under investigation. However, these studies were driven by a common purpose, namely that of determining whether there were gender differences in terms of the number of words retrieved by males and females in an equal amount of time. As can be observed, the means reported in these studies revealed a differential pattern in favour of female EFL learners: They systematically produced a higher number of words than did their male counterparts in primary, early secondary and tertiary education, both in English and in Spanish as an L2. Although the tendency in favour of females seems clear, there might be the possibility of not being significantly different as some studies did not apply inferential statistics to prove their findings. Likewise, concerning English as an L2, more research is necessary as we do not know whether the quantitative differences in favour of girls reported in primary or early secondary education will be also observed in EFL learners in post-secondary education. Furthermore, at any educational level, we do not know which words L2 learners associate with prompts related to daily issues, and whether males and females 161 Rosa María Jiménez Catalán & Andrés Canga Alonso ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 produce different or similar words in lexical availability tasks. Previous studies provided information about the number of words, but not about the actual words produced by males and females. Thus, the present study attempts to contribute to L2 gender lexical availability research by means of the identification and analysis of the most frequent English words associated with three prompts related to daily issues by male and female adolescent EFL learners in the twelfth form. Our research questions were as follows: Study L2 Learning Context Sample Prompts Mean (types) Jiménez Catalán & Ojeda Alba 2009 English 6th Form Spain 110 boys, 110 girls 15 Boys: 99.07 Girls: 119 Fernández Fontecha, 2010 English 8th Form Spain 139 boys 111 girls 6Boys: 74.01 Girls: 83 Jing, 2012 Spanish University China 63 boys 200 girls 16 Boys: 146 Girls: 157 Sandu, 2012 Spanish 12th Form Romania 204 boys 76 girls 16 Boys: 124.09 Girls: 173 González Fernández 2013 Spanish 12th Form Turkey 46 boys 32 girls 16 Boys: 65 Girls: 72 Agustín Llach & Fernández Fontecha, 2014 English 6th Form 9th Form Spain 106 boys 84 girls 9 Boys: 23 (6th Form). 111 (9th Form) Girls: 86.5 (6th Form), 129 (9th Form) Samper, 2002 Spanish University Spain 17 boys 16 Means in favour of females in 15 prompts. Table 1. Gender outcomes in L2 lexical availability studies ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 162 1. Do male and female EFL learners differ in the average number of words produced in the lexical availability task? 2. Which words are retrieved most frequently by male and female EFL learners in response to the most productive prompts? 3. Methodology 3.1. Participants The sample comprised 265 (171 females and 94 males) second year baccalaureate (equivalent to twelfth form) EFL learners from five state high schools located in La Rioja, a monolingual community in the north of Spain. Students answered a background questionnaire to provide researchers with information about their mother tongue, other languages they spoke at home or in their social interactions, their gender and their previous exposure to English. The questionnaire responses revealed that 95.47% of the informants were Spanish L1 speakers and did not speak any other language at home. The remaining 4.53% used other languages at home since their parents had not been born in Spain. These languages were Romanian (1.89), Arabic (1.13), Portuguese (0.68), Armenian (0.38) and Georgian (0.38). Nevertheless, they spoke Spanish at school, with their friends and in their daily social encounters. High school head teachers signed a consent form in order for the tasks to be administered. They also informed the students’ parents and tutors. The students whose families did not consent to them taking part in the tasks moved to another room while their classmates accomplished the tasks. 3.2. Data Collection and Procedures Students were presented with the background questionnaire mentioned in the previous section, and with a written lexical availability task consisting of nine prompts in English, which were provided in the following order: ‘Parts of the Body’, ‘Clothes’, ‘Food & Drink’, ‘School’, ‘Town’, ‘Countryside’, ‘Animals’, ‘Hobbies’ and ‘Professions’. The order was identical for all students as to warrant the same conditions in the data collection and task administration processes. Each prompt was written in bold capital letters at the top of the page, with one page per prompt. 163 Rosa María Jiménez Catalán & Andrés Canga Alonso ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 Numbered lines were provided on each page to facilitate the researchers’ identification of the order of the responses. The selection of the prompts was based on the following criteria: 1. Their inclusion in previous lexical availability research on foreign language learners; this provided us with a framework for comparing the results derived from the present study; 2. their potential to elicit words related to learners’ realities, as well as to uncover possible gender differences; and 3. learners’ previous exposure to the semantic field represented by the prompt throughout primary and secondary education. Students were told to respond to each prompt individually and not to move on to the following prompt until instructed to do so by the researchers. They were given two minutes to write down as many words as possible in response to each prompt. The time was controlled by a stop watch by the researchers. Instructions were given in Spanish, both orally and in written form. Each student was given a code number to ensure anonymity. The data were codified in Excel files according to the following variables: L1, number of languages known/spoken, age, sex/gender, and number of different words (types) produced in response to each prompt per student. Prior to this, the corpus was edited following previous L2 English lexical availability studies (Jiménez Catalán and Ojeda Alba, 2009; Samper Hernández & Jiménez Catalán, 2014). The criteria were as follows: i. correcting spelling errors; ii. counting repeated words in the same prompt only once; iii. removing Spanish words and proper nouns, except for those that referred to cities or countries in their English version (such as London or Sweden); iv. lemmatising plural words as the singular form unless they were plural in English (for example, trousers); v. changing verb forms to bare infinitives unless they appeared as lexical entries in dictionaries; vi. keeping irregular verb forms and counting them as different tokens; vii. counting abbreviations (such as mum) if they were included as lexical entries in dictionaries; ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 164 viii. hyphenation of lexical units with a lexicalised meaning (for example, fish-and-chips); ix. deleting the titles of films, books or songs, and x. controversial words, including shortened forms such as TV or mum were checked in two on-line dictionaries (Wordreference.com and Cambridge Online) to verify that they were included as entries corresponding to separate English words. The edited responses of each student were then entered into a Microsoft Excel© file in order to run a quantitative analysis. In addition, the edited data were stored as a series of plain text files. Wordsmith Tools version 5 was used to identify the words retrieved most frequently by males and by females. Finally, SPSS 24 was used to determine values of significance. 4. Results Considering the whole sample (males and females all together) and the nine prompts in the lexical availability task, 12th EFL learners produced as average 141.5 words (SD= 42.9). Table 2 shows the maximum and minimum values as well as the means and standard deviations per prompt for the whole sample. Prompt Min.-Max. Mean (SD) Body 0 - 30 15 (5.3) Clothes 3 - 30 12.7 (5.3) Food & Drink 4 - 39 18.2 (6.1) School 1 - 37 19.8 (6.2) Town 2 - 37 16 (5.7) Countryside 0 - 34 12.5 (6.9) Animals 5 - 32 16.8 (5.5) Hobbies 0 - 34 15.3 (5.8) Professions 0 - 34 15.3 (5.8) Table 2. Descriptive statistics per prompt 165 Rosa María Jiménez Catalán & Andrés Canga Alonso ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 Our first research question aimed at ascertaining whether there would be gender differences in the average number of words generated by male and female EFL learners. Table 3 shows the means of words retrieved by males and females for the whole task as well as per prompt. Our results do not corroborate the tendency in favour of females reported in previous lexical availability research. Contrary to expectations, a differential pattern in favour of males can be observed, and males obtained higher mean values in all the prompts except for ‘Clothes’ and ‘Food & Drink’, for which females provided a slightly higher number of words. However, the t-test applied to the means points to the absence of significant differences in the number of words produced by males and females both for the whole task (nine prompts) and per prompt. Mean (SD) t-Student Males Females t(263) p-value Total 142.6 (45.8) 140.9 (41.2) 0.299 0.765 Body 15.7 (5.5) 14.6 (5.1) 1.571 0.117 Clothes 12.5 (5.5) 12.8 (5.2) -0.4 0.689 Food & Drink 17.4 (6.3) 18.7 (5.9) -1.628 0.105 School 19.8 (6.3) 19.7 (6.2) 0.116 0.908 Town 16.1 (6.2) 15.9 (5.4) 0.304 0.762 Countryside 12.5 (7.1) 12.4 (6.9) 0.136 0.892 Animals 17.6 (5.9) 16.3 (5.2) 1.777 0.077 Hobbies 15.5 (6.5) 15.2 (5.4) 0.3 0.764 Professions 15.5 (6.5) 15.2 (5.4) 0.3 0.764 Table 3. Descriptive and inferential statistics for the number of words (types) produced by males and females Table 4 displays the number and percentage of males and females who were above and below the means. The close inspection of percentages ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 172 Furthermore, the inclusion of a detailed analysis of all the words retrieved by male and female EFL learners in lexical availability tasks would expand research on gender and foreign language education considerably, as not only could the words male and female EFL learners associate with other words be identified, but their vocabulary knowledge in the target language could also be ascertained. This could be done by conducting further analyses of learners’ lexical availability output to determine the frequency and the level of the words. Some preliminary studies have been conducted in this regard (López González, 2010), but they did not focus on the gender variable. Acknowledgements This work is framed under a research project FFI 2013-47707-P. 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Heidelberg: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-7158-1_11 ELIA 19, 2019, pp. 157-176 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2019.i19.07 The available English lexicon of male and female Spanish adolescents 176 Sandu, B. (2012). La disponibilidad léxica en alumnos rumanos de ELE: incidencia de la variable ‘sexo/género’ y su correlación con el ‘nivel escolar. Lingua Americana, 31, 61-85. Sunderland, J. (2000). Issues of language and gender in second and foreign language education. Language Teaching, 33 (4), 203-223. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0261444800015688 First version received: April, 2019 Final version accepted: September, 2019