Abstract
A wealth of research on native language conversational interaction has indicated that women and men talk differently, but little is known about how gender plays a role in L2 conversation, especially how gender-differentiated speech styles affect the interlocutor's willingness and ways to talk, thus creating different learning opportunities for female and male learners. Drawing on Long's Interaction Hypothesis, the present study investigated how gender affects incidence of negotiation for meaning in task-based interactions, focusing on language-related episodes (LREs). Subjects comprised 24 Chinese-speaking learners of English at the college level, with an equal number of females and males. Each subject completed two text-reconstruction tasks in English with a same-gender partner and a mixed-gender partner on different days. Each task was followed by a stimulated recall session in Chinese, which was to collect participants' comments on their interactions for the analysis of speech styles. Lakoff and Tannen's (1984) categorization of speech styles in native language conversation was adopted for the analysis of speech styles in L2 interactions. The results indicate that the gender of the learners participating in task-based interactions did not significantly influence the interactional patterns in terms of the incidence or resolution of LREs. However, it was found that both female and male learners resolved LREs in a more targetlike way when working with mixed-gender partners than with same-gender partners. Gender-differentiated speech styles were also observed, with more males adopting the distance style and more females the clarity style. Speakers of the distance style were found to be more likely to increase their interlocutors' willingness to offer LRE resolutions and thus received more input. In contrast, speakers of the clarity style tended to turn off their interlocutors' willingness to provide LRE resolutions and thus received less input. The results of the study shed some light on our understanding of the relationship between gender influence on conversational interaction and SLA.