Gendered Differences In Expository Essay Writing Among Undergraduate Students Of University Of Cape Coast

Abstract

The present study explored gendered differences in expository essays written by undergraduate students of the University of Cape Coast. Using cluster quota-sampling techniques, the researcher sampled 215 written essays of level 100 students of the Department of Communication Studies, University of Cape Coast. Guided by systemic functional linguistic theory and Expository Essay Quality Checklist (2EQC), the researcher analyzed the sampled data to discover the gendered differences. First, the study revealed that male and female undergraduate students did not differ significantly in their expository essay writing competence. Secondly, the study showed that male and female undergraduate students did not differ significantly in their writing productivity as measured by word and paragraph analysis. Finally, there were no structural differences in how first year female undergraduate students structured their paragraphs. Based on these findings, the researcher recommended that there is the need to expand writing research in Ghana to include other factors that have been shown to mediate gender differences in writing productivity such as socio-economic factors, motivation, and among others.