A research group at Tokyo Metropolitan University conducted a survey of junior high school students who are learning English as a foreign language (second language), and there is a remarkable gender difference in brain activity when processing English sentences. I found that there was a difference in the strategy of.
In research on second language acquisition, there are many findings found in the United States and Europe, and there are few scientific data on foreign language learning environments such as Japanese children.Therefore, in this study, for Japanese junior high school students, what kind of individual characteristics are related to the acquisition of English, brain activity, English test results, working memory (update / operation while memorizing information in the short term) The survey was conducted based on the capacity of analysis).
As a result, the test results and working memory capacity were higher for girls on average than for boys, but boys were quicker in the brain to perform syntactic processing according to grammatical rules (correct or incorrect sentences). It turned out that the judgment) was made.More interestingly, it was found that boys had reduced brain activity when listening to non-sentences, resulting in more efficient processing.
While boys tended to prioritize grammatical processing, girls tended to process various linguistic knowledge obtained from the entire sentence, such as the sound (phonology) and meaning of words, in an integrated manner.In addition, a positive correlation was found only for girls between the test scores and the working memory capacity, suggesting that the processing was performed by utilizing the working memory function.
These gender differences may reflect differences in strategies in learning and listening to English.This result is expected to pave the way for the development of effective teaching methods in school education that consider gender differences and English learning methods based on the grounds of brain science research.
