Roles of Gender in the Relationship between EFL Learners’ Perceptions of the Context and their Speaking Achievement

Abstract

Recently, Korean higher education has endeavored to include ICT in the educational program while explicitly addressing global competitiveness in their English curriculum. This study investigates a gender difference in the interplay between the EFL learners’ perceptions of the learning context and their achievements in English speaking. The contextual factors included the use of an online learning management system (LMS), the English-medium instruction (EMI) policy, foreign instructors and a need for a Korean instructor. The data consisted of questionnaire responses of 104 college freshmen (74 males and 30 females) taking an English speaking course, final scores in an on-offline blended speaking course, and qualitative interviews with five students. In the descriptive and the correlation analyses, the gender difference in the perceptions of the online LMS was significant with its score being higher in the female group than the male group. The female students acquired higher scores than the male students, which was statistically significant. In the male group, achievement had no statistically significant correlation with any of the contextual factors, whereas female students’ achievements in English speaking correlated significantly with their perception of the LMS and the extent to which they felt the need for a Korean instructor. The findings corroborate relationship between the perceived roles of contextual factors and L2 achievement, which differs by gender. Pedagogical implications are discussed for effective, ICT-incorporated EFL curriculum and successful implementation of EMI.