Boys spell it out with action, sport
STUDENTS’ spelling and writing skills follow gender stereotypes to the letter, research shows.
Analysis of more than 150,000 writing samples from students in years 3 to 7 has revealed that boys are more likely to write about “actionbased” topics such as sport, violence and video games.
Writing about relationships was more common among female students. Girls remain more proficient spellers than boys at all year levels despite the number of spelling mistakes falling over time, but the gap widens even further at year 7 – when girls continue to improve while boys show a spike in errors compared with previous years.
The most recent Language Gap report found boys’ interest in writing dropped off over time, limiting their vocabularies and spelling proficiency.
The report’s author and education lecturer at Flinders University, Anne Bayetto, said gendered interests and skills were evident across all year levels.
“Girls tended to write vocab that was more domestically oriented, and talked more about passive pastimes in relation to home, family and friends, whereas boys tend to write more about active sport and leisure, competitions about fighting and technology,” she said.
“Boys were more keenly writing about competitive activities, resolving matters with violence, as opposed to using conversation and resolutions to come to an agreed stance.”
Ms Bayetto said boys experienced social pressures to disregard learning, which carried flow-on effects in their academic performance. International studies have also shown girls acquire language skills faster than boys.
“Boys often feel social pressure from their peer group not to publicly display knowledge,” Ms Bayetto said. “This causes many boys to avoid engaging in class discussion, which is a critical time for learners to use their vocabularies. By not engaging as frequently in class, boys are not getting this practice at using new words, which limits the size of their vocabularies.”
The words “killing” and “death” were featured exponentially more often in boys’ writing than girls’, the report found.
University of Canberra spelling expert Dr Tessa Daffern said spelling was a crucial building block in a child’s education, particularly when it came to learning to read and write.
“Students who are good at spelling tend to use a wider range of words in their writing and they don’t pause as often to think about the spelling of words while they are writing,” she said.