A Comparative Study Of Sentence Variety In Essays Written By Third Year Efl Male And Female Students At The Department Of English Larbi Ben M’hidi University

Résumé: Sentence variety helps to avoid monotony and dullness since opting for a variation of syntactic structures and patterns instead of completely using simple and short ones makes writing more expressive, professional, interesting, and appealing to the readers. In fact, the level of sentence variety in students' writings can be affected by their gender and opinions. In this regard, the current study aims to examine sentence variety in essays written by twenty four third year male and female students, at the Department of English, Larbi Ben M'hidi University. Specifically, it seeks to investigate the effect of students' gender and opinions towards the exclusivity of teachers-assigned topics at the level of sentence variety. First, students' opinions towards the exclusivity of teachers-assigned topics were classified into positive and negative through the use of MonkeyLearn tool for Sentiment Analysis, and the sample was selected on the basis of the results obtained together with students' gender. Sentence variety in the essays written by the participants was manually analysed, and the data was inspected via the statistical software Jamovi to discover the differences between the groups. The first research question about the similarities and differences between male and female students' level of sentence variety and the second one that asks whether there is an effect of students' gender and opinions towards the exclusivity of teachers-assigned topics on sentence variety were answered. The results of the independent samples t-test revealed that there was no significant difference between the level of sentence variety in essays written by male and female students who had positive and negative opinions towards the exclusivity of teachers-assigned topics; thus, the null hypothesis was validated. In other words, students' gender and opinions did not have an effect on sentence variety. Interestingly, the study can help in raising students' and teachers' awareness of the value of sentence variety in writing.

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