Gender Differences in Efl Academic Writing : Syntactic Complexity, Means of Integrating Cited Information, and Organizing Arguments

The purpose of this two-phase, sequential mixed methods study was to find out whether there were any decencies between male and female MA students' theses regarding the common features of academic writing such as syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments.Ten male written theses and fifteen female written theses in TEFL and Linguistics were chosen. In the first phase, the number of T-units and clauses of each text and the frequency of the occurrence of the cohesive devices in both males' and females' writings were counted; the number of direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries from each thesis were calculated to find out the frequency of the occurrence of means of integrating cited information. These data were analyzed through the statistical program SPSS. In the second phase, the methods of presenting arguments were analyzed. The results of this study showed significant differences between men's and women's texts in syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments.