Brain Dominance and Gender Differences in Writing Performance of Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between Iranian male and female EFL learners’ brain dominance and their writing performance on two different writing tasks including an argumentative and a descriptive writing task. For this purpose, 60 EFL Students from Shokoh institute in Tehran in intermediate level were selected from available classes in intermediate level.  They were mixed in terms of their gender, 30 men and 30 women, between the ages of 15 to 23 years. Among the participants, there were 48 left-brained and 12 right-brained. Instruments of the study included Oxford Placement Test (OPT) (OUP, 2001) containing 40 questions as a homogeneity test, Brain Dominance Survey (BDS) (Davis, Nur & Ruru, 1994) to discover the hemispheric preferences, and two writing tasks to assess the writing performance. The results show that female language learners are more successful in argumentative writing tasks which demand higher levels of cognition.