engleski

Gender stereotyping bias – assessment of the swimming and underwater diving vocabulary knowledge in English as a foreign language in kinesiology

Research was done on a sample of kinesiology students who learned, in the obligatory subject English language, English as a foreign language in kinesiology. The general aim of this analysis was to further investigate gender stereotyping bias in verbal skills. The specific aim was to find out whether there were any significant differences as regards gender in the 31-item vocabulary translation test in which terms had to be translated from English as a foreign language into Croatian as L1. The sample was comprised of 96 – 48 male and 48 female – students of the third year from the Faculty of Kinesiology University of Zagreb who learned English as professional foreign language of kinesiology. To avoid any possible advantages as regards the choice of sport from which the terms were selected for the assessment, two gender-neutral sports were chosen – swimming and underwater diving, i.e. neither of them could be said to be preferred either by men or by women. The technical terms were given for translation without any context – the 31 items were considered as 31 dependent variables, and their answers were scored on a 3-point scale ranging from 1 (incorrect), 2 (partially correct), to 3 (correct). Although women are, in general, regarded to be better in verbal skills than men, the results of previous research done into gender differences between male and female kinesiology students, as regards verbal skills related to the knowledge of technical kinesiological vocabulary, has shown that men achieved either equally good or sometimes even better results in the translation of sport-specific terms from English as a foreign language into Croatian as the mother tongue than their female colleagues. In other words, previous research done on the population of kinesiology students pointed to the justified bias regarding female verbal superiority. The results of the series of Mann-Whitney U tests showed that men achieved better results in translating four items, whereas female students bettered their male colleagues in only one item. Such results corroborate the attitude that the differences in various skills that have for a long time been considered to be gender-determined seem to diminish or even disappear.

gender; swimming; translation; underwater diving; verbal skills

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