Gender and Learning

[wushijiao]

This year, accoring to the US Dept.of Education, 133 women will graduate from college for every 100 men. Men are underperforming not only in college, but also in high school and primary school. This trend of women academically outperforming men is not only confined to the US, but is also widespread worldwide.

For those teaching in English in China, I have a few questions:

1) Have you noticed that girls do much better than boys? This is not to say that some of the best students aren't boys. I teach some guys that are really amazing. But if you look at the top 20%, say, of your classes, is there a predominance of females?

2) Why is this, in your opinion? Is it due to the "social constructions" of learnng Englsih? Is it biological? Or both?

3) If boys are doing worse than girls, what can be done to fix the situation and get guys interested in learning again?

[badr]

I teach at a "teacher's college" and i have to admit that it is strange. about 96% of our 7000 students are females. Admittedly, teaching is not a popular profession for men but i never imagined it would be this one-sided.

In my new Freshmen English majors class, i have only one boy and 36 girls......

[nipponman]

Where I go to school (university of pittsburgh), there aren't many female engineers, mostly male. The number of black female engineers is even lower.

[gato]

In the US, at least, guys probably are doing worse because they play too much video game in high school and drink too much in college.

[kudra]

My guess is that in the US, the guys have other ways to make a living. It could be that for a variety of social reasons they are able to network in the existing environment and succeed without formal education.

So, before we jump to conclusions about innate abilities, it could be that guys can get what they want economically given the current environment without sitting in class.

Presumably a similar story can be told in China.

[gougou]

I also think that societal factors play a role at least as important as biological ones. I agree with kudra that women probably still have to work more than men to achieve the same status.

The figures quoted from the US Dep't of Education most likely tells us more about "preferences" (looking for a better word here) than about aptitudes: I would guess that men being more likely to take up manual labor, the ratio of women in college is going to increase hand in hand with equality of the genders (which makes it easier/more accepted for women to enter college.)

Additionally, however, studies repeatedly suggest that women do better in verbal subjects, while men outperform women in mathematical subjects. For example:

Female students outperformed male students on almost all indices of achievement related to language and literacy throughout their school careers.

http://www.minedu.govt.nz/index.cfm?layout=document&documentid=3280&indexid=5874&indexparentid=5871

or

Women outpace men on reading and other verbal skills.

(from http://www.columbia-stmarys.org/1651.cfm)

Also read this, if you're interested.

[wushijiao]

Thanks for the replies.

I’ll go ahead and answer my questions, based on my own experience:

1) Females seem to do much better than males in English. Right now, I teach at a university in which we rank our students based on their English performance. Every semester, students might go up a level or two, or drop down based on their previous semester’s grades. Without a doubt, males congregate down at the bottom and the higher level classes are dominated by women. For example, in the top tier right now, there are 5 males and 62 females.

I’ve seen similar trends in other schools that I’ve worked at in China.

2) It’s hard to say if there is a biological reason behind this. That would, of course, require a lot of controversial research that has yet to be done. But, I think there are fairly obvious social reasons why men don’t do as well as women in China. First, guys tend to play more PC games than women. It seems that playing video games is the unanimous habit among all my male students (that and basketball). This clearly takes up a lot of time in which they could be studying. Second, generally speaking, discipline problems are worse with men. Guys are always fighting each other and generally being jackasses and class clowns. But thirdly, I wonder to what degree studying English has taken on “feminine” connotations in China. In other words, is studying English considered “silly” or “wussy” or uncool”? I certainly think so. One of my best students right now is a fairly cool guy- he is popular with the ladies, he wears hip hop clothes, and he listens to rap. Whenever he comes to “English Corner” or any other extracurricular activities, he always has a look of bewilderment and amazement, as if he just accidentally stumbled upon the English Corner.

So, I think studying English, as it currently stands, to some degree, might be seen in the same light as studying French would be in, say, Nebraska in the US. Of course, I may be wrong.

3) How can we get young guys interested in learning English? Or, more broadly, how can we get all students interested in learning English? I think there are at least two ways.

The first way to get guys interested in English is perhaps to get periodicals that they would be interested in- i.e. basketball magazines, sports magazines, sci-fi comics, comics about war….etc. The last time I went back to the US, I brought back a book about Snoopy, which is always being read by students in one of our activity rooms. Chinese students experience quite a brutal jump from reading texts in high school that are a jumbled concoction of vocabulary words crammed into a small page, with no content that is at all applicable to their lives to then reading authentic texts that are dense with meaning, related to difficult subjects like politics, history, literature, economics, and the environment in college. There has to be a middle step that is both enjoyable and meaningful for their lives, although I’m not 100% sure what that is yet.

Second, I think using entertaining Hollywood movies, and exploiting them for all their linguistic worth, is something that perhaps could and should be explored by more teachers. It might be that studying English from someone like Vin Diesel might dispel the notion that English is not for men.

Other than this, I’m really at a loss for ways to get the somewhat “lower level” guys enthusiastically motivated to learn English, other than traditional methods. Any ideas?

[gougou]

I am not teaching myself (for the time being), but interested in the subject. Do you think that the boys' underperforming is due to missing motivation? I.e., if you look at the lower tiers, are those people the ones that are not interested? Or are they otherwise incapable of learning the language?

[wushijiao]

if you look at the lower tiers, are those people the ones that are not interested?

Well, of course some "lower level" students work hard and are motivated. But generally, motivation is low. Students seem bored.

Why? Well, here are a few of my theories:

1) The underperforming students are usually put in the lower level classes. This can hurt an individual’s self-confidence.

2) They haven’t had the thrill of achieving. If you read a lot, you gain vocab. You gain vocab, you can read more easily. As you read more easily, you enjoy reading more. As you enjoy reading more, you read more. Unfortunately, this is a positive cycle that the “lower level” students don’t get sucked into.

3) Perhaps, in all countries and all societies, there is a limited percentage of people who are genuinely interested in foreign cultures and languages.

Or are they otherwise incapable of learning the language?

I’ve developed a theory about this. After getting to an intermediate level in English, it is damn hard to continue to progress, especially in a Chinese language environment. I recently read that an average college-educated, native speaker knows 17,000 word families in English (ie. “communicate” and “communication” would just count as one). Many students successfully learn the most common 2-3,000 word families. But after that, it becomes really difficult to acquire those less common ones. These are rare words and phrases. For example, “extradite”, “plunger”, “loon”, “get the show on the road”, “grease someone’s palm”….etc.

I think any attempt to memorize these types of words by buying a book and just reciting them, without any context, is doomed to fail. If you attempt to memorize one of these words, without learning in massive volumes, I think the learning strategy will fail, unless you have a brilliant memory. The successful students read books extensively. They watch a lot of movies. They read the newspaper daily. When the successful students run across a rare word or phrase and then explicitly try to memorize it, they are probably more likely to run across it again in the course of extensive language exposure. If they run across the word a few times, they’re more likely to remember it.

So, I think the role of an English teacher at the college level is not only to explicitly teach language, but also to motivate and coach the students as to how to become efficient independent learners. However, that role hinges on the assumption that students want to put in the time and energy necessary to lift their English level out of the intermediate-level plateau. Therefore, it is crucial that teachers know how to motivate and guide. Personally, I think I have a lot of students that have untapped potential, but I’m going about it a bit wrong. Most of these students are dudes, I’d say.

[nipponman]

You can see from many aptitude tests etc where the strengths naturally lie. However, there are many males that are good at english. The reasons, I think, that males

don't get as good grades as females (in general) and do as well in english, 1. There are a lot of brilliant males in prision, obviously excluding them from academia. They might not be wise, but there are some smart ones. Secondly (and I'm talking generally, here, I don't know much about china), our brains aren't as well wired for communication as womens brains are. I saw this on the discovery channel, apparently, the wiring between the two-halves of womens brains, called the central sulcus, is more efficient (looking for a neutral term but couldn't find one). This isn't to say it's better, it is just different. Because by not being so well wired in that area, guys gain different skills naturally. For men these include: better sense of direction, focus on single objects, and ability to grasp highly abstract concepts. While for women it's :better communication, instant math (women can do math calculations in their heads faster than males can), and others I am not aware of. Now this isn't to say that each gender doesn't possess these skills, but they are inhanced in one because of brain wiring. So, that brings me back to school, generally, men will tend to gravitate towards math and science, and women towards English, and social science. I noticed alot of females (outnumbered us guys) in my psychology class, but not too many in my engineering analysis class. So, there's my two cents.

[gato]

Part of it is probably social. Chinese males are encouraged to be the strong, silent type, much more so than even the John Wayne Americans or stiff upper lipped Brits.

Wushijiao, do you see any correlation between your students' Chinese language ability and their English ability?? Male students who are articulate and expressive in Chinese might well have an easier time with English, as well.

[skylee]

Sorry to side-track, but I think expressive and articulate male students can be quite annoying. Just my personal opinion.

[gato]

Yours probably is the typical Chinese opinion. Hehe!

[wushijiao]

our brains aren't as well wired for communication as womens brains are. I saw this on the discovery channel, apparently, the wiring between the two-halves of womens brains, called the central sulcus, is more efficient (looking for a neutral term but couldn't find one). This isn't to say it's better, it is just different.

This is interesting. I've read a bit about similar stuff. I think there may be some biological factors that could predispose certain genders to be slightly better at certain skills. (Of course, in American academia this is taboo to bring up because men have used biological arguements to oppress women for centuries).

Chinese males are encouraged to be the strong, silent type, much more so than even the John Wayne Americans or stiff upper lipped Brits.

I have certainly noticed this. But that's why I generally call on students, usually after they have had pair work to practice what they are going to say. 非说不可!

Sorry to side-track, but I think expressive and articulate male students can be quite annoying. Just my personal opinion

Interesting. I think maybe in the higher levels, for the "cool" guys, who hang out with buddies in the lower level classes, it can be a bit slightly awkward to be in a class that is filled with lots of girls and a few expressive nerds (ie. the "me"-type ).

Clearly, for almost all Chinese universities, not being able to choose one's classes gives class a certain clique-ish "high school" dynamic (from the American point of view).

[mr.stinky]

once upon a time, a group of the enlightened determined that school-age boys

acting up was improper....incorrect in a social setting, not in an evolutionary

sense. this was to be remedied at first with counseling and/or punishmint to

alter behavior, and then with massive doses of mood-altering drugs. ritalin is

commonly prescribed for troubled boys - calms them down of course, but also

removes their interest and ambition. in short, a massive proportion of the boys

in u.s. schools are little more than prepubescent stoners. the parents allow this

as it permits them to abdicate their parenting responsibilities.

[Lu]

I don't think it has anything to do with English being uncool or something. And it's not just Chinese learners of English that are mostly girls. In every language class I've been in in my life there were significantly more girls than boys (except in the bixiuke). High school classes in Holland, Chinese in university, Chinese for foreigners in Beijing and Taipei: the girls invariably outnumbered the boys. I guess this is because girls learn languages easier than boys (brain structure), so they like it better than boys, so they are more likely to study them than boys.

[wushijiao]

Here's a good Newsweek article that discusses the difficulties boys are having in the US:

By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."

With millions of parents wringing their hands, educators are searching for new tools to help tackle the problem of boys. Books including Michael Thompson's best seller "Raising Cain" (recently made into a PBS documentary) and Harvard psychologist William Pollack's definitive work "Real Boys" have become must-reads in the teachers' lounge. The Gurian Institute, founded in 1997 by family therapist Michael Gurian to help the people on the front lines help boys, has enrolled 15,000 teachers in its seminars. Even the Gates Foundation, which in the last five years has given away nearly a billion dollars to innovative high schools, is making boys a big priority. "Helping underperforming boys," says Jim Shelton, the foundation's education director, "has become part of our core mission."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/

Although, perhaps the problem isn't as serious as the article makes it seem. Here is an article countering the Newsweek one, showing males still outperform females on the SAT:

http://newsbusters.org/node/3790

Still, females are starting to outnumber males 60/40 in many colleges (meaning college is even more of a paradise for the guys who study well in high school ).

Nonetheless, if the root issue has to do with the way males psychologically develop slower than females, then the problem may be universal, and not just confined to the US.

This week in class, my students had to read a fairly dry academic paper. I made a bunch of true/false questions. Then I divided the class into two teams. Each team had a person who represented ‘true”, and a person who represented “false”. These people stood at the very back of the classroom. Then, one person from each team came to the front of the classroom. I gave each person a ball. I then read a statement. If the statement was true, the person at the front of the class had to throw the ball to the person at the back of the class who represented “true”. If said person caught the ball before the other team’s “true” person caught the ball, then the first team would receive a point. If the person threw the ball inaccurately, or threw it to the “false” person, then someone from the team would have to give the ball back to the thrower so that he/she could re-throw to the correct person.

All in all, the game seemed fairly successful. Low performing students were reading the article with more care then I’ve ever seen. Students (mainly boys with good physical coordination) who normally receive little praise became heroes, of sorts.

I normally would not have considered doing this sort of thing at the university level. But I figured, the low levels classes, in some cases, have nothing to lose because little else has worked out well with them.

I think it will be interesting to try to do things like this over the course of a semester, and see how well the males respond.

[mlomker]

I guess this is because girls learn languages easier than boys (brain structure), so they like it better than boys, so they are more likely to study them than boys.

I have a different theory--there is discrimation for employment and boys will generally get jobs before girls and their salaries will always be higher for doing the same quality of work. This results in the girls choosing to study harder than the boys in order to secure a decent job and salary for themselves.

There is also the dynamic that boys are culturally predisposed to physical labor (everything from carpentry to auto mechanics) whereas women tend to be pigeon-holed into being homemakers or entering more cerebral career fields (teaching, medical fields, etc).

I think it is a combination of discrimination and acculturation that leads women to be more focused on academic pursuits--I don't find the genetic arguments to be persuasive.

[atitarev]

I am the best in my class (sorry for not being modest) and I am male. Another man in our class is pretty good with spoken Chinese. Women in our class are too shy and speak in very low voices and have lower confidence, IMO. Not sure if gender (at least for adults) has anything to do with it. Not so sure about young students, though. Just your personality, personal ability, previous experiences and how much time you have, of course, your attitude. I think age has much bigger impact, though. The older you get, the harder it becomes to study.