The Effect of gender on Iranian EFL Learners ' Lexical Errors in Writing

Post method era encourages teachers for taking into consideration the different layers of reality of the classroom. The most important layer of reality is individual differences . Gender is a key factor, among other factors of individual differences, which needs to be considered in teaching profession in general and language teaching in particular. A thorough review of literature gives us a clear picture of dichotomous finding regarding the effect of gender on learning language skills. When it comes to writing, issue becomes more complicated, because, as Williams (2009) puts it, there are a few model of writing and none of them is comprehensive. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and categorize the lexical errors that appear in a group of high school EFL learners’ compositions in Khorramabad, Iran in an attempt to find a possible trace of gender in these errors. There were 50 subjects with 25 male and 25 female learners under investigation. The SPSS program was used to process the analysis of the data. Two-way Analysis Of Variance (Two-Way ANOVA) was used to evaluate the hypothesis of significant difference between the mean scores of male and female students' writing skills in types of lexical errors. The results revealed that, there is no significant difference between male and female students in type of lexical errors in their writing skill. It also was found that female learners outperform their peer male learners in their writing scores.