Gender Variation in the Writings of Students of Selected Colleges of Education: a Study on Syntactic Complexit

Abstract

ABSTRACT This thesis explored the differences in writings produced by both male and female students in colleges of education in Ghana with respect to syntactic complexity. The study sought to find out which gender is syntactically complex in writing of argumentative essay. Again, the study looked at the effect of syntactic complexity on the quality of students’ writing of argumentative essay. The study was based on a corpus of two hundred examination essays belonging to the argumentation mode collected from two hundred students in Assin Fosu, Wesley and Presbyterian Colleges of Education who took the English Language Studies course (FDC 211) in 2018/2019 academic year. The study lent credit to the Difference version of gender and language theory as it upheld the existence of variation in the writing of males and females with regard to writing syntactically complex sentences. The analysis showed that the male students were more syntactically complex than the female students in their writings. The study established clear variations in the areas of length of production unit, sentence complexity, amount of subordination and coordination and particular structures. The study also showed that there was a positive but weak relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality. That is, the greater the density of length of production unit, sentence complexity, amount of subordination and particular structures, the higher the quality of the students’ writing. The present study focused on written language. Subsequent studies could examine gender variation with regard to syntactic complexity in spoken language.