Gender-induced Variation in L2 Production: The Case of Reference Terms.

Variation in language reception and production is one of the enduring problems of second language acquisition research. There are a number of sources of variation in L2 production. The present study addresses gender-prompted variation in the use of reference terms. Reference deals with the links between words and objects or events in the world. In discourse analysis, reference is use to tackle the links between words (or phrases) and other words (or phrases) in discourse. Reference terms are operationalized by using lexical noun phrases, common nouns, personal pronouns, indefinite articles, propositional phrases and the like. For the purpose of data collection forty EFL intermediate students (20 male students and 20 female students) participated in the preset study. Each participant transacted the narrative task in monologic condition with the second researcher. The results of the statistical analyses revealed that there have been significant differences between the mean of male group and female group in the use of reference terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]