Сайт учителя английского языка

Presenter: Tell us some of differences between the boys and girls learn.

Mr. Nixon: Well, there are a lot of differences but we mustn’t forget that there are a lot of similarities as well. Boys and girls tend to work well together in the classroom because of the similarities and the differences. But, having said that, there are important differences which we should pay attention to. The first of these differences relates to the subjects that children find interesting. It has long been believed that boys are more attracted to practical subjects and sciences, whereas girls tend to go for more artistic subjects. This appears to be true, according to our research. Of the school student we spoke to, it was very common for boys to describe maths, physics and chemistry as their favourite subjects. Girls, on the other hand, chose languages, art and literature as their favourites. Interestingly, when asked to say why they didn’t like a particular subject, the boys frequently mentioned that it was a subject for girls, while the girls would simply say that the subject was boring.
This is backed up by their preferences in reading – girls prefer stories, while boys prefer more practical reading matter. An important point to mention here is that, although boys would not choose to read stories, if a teacher sat down with them and explained why they should read them – what they would get out of them – then they nearly always learned a lot more.
In lessons, it is usually the boys who will take a chance and guess an answer – with the girls holding back more because they are afraid of getting it wrong. This is similar to the different ways in which children use computers. If you give boys and girls a job to do on a computer, it is usually the boys who will experiment and play around with what the computer can do. Girls tend to stick to the task they have been given. We believe that this shows one of the biggest differences – boys learn in a less direct but wider area. Girls learn in a logical, step-by-step way.
Girls and women write differently to boys and men. The girls are more likely to write personal things, using words like I, you, he, she and we. When we looked at the writing of boys, we found that they more often used words related to objects, like it, the and that, as well as words referring to numbers, such as many, more or thousands.
When they are asked to write something, girls are usually better at writing what the teacher had in mind. Boys need more help with how to write, and they need to do it in stages. And even though girls do not like scientific subjects as much as boys do, they still write about them in better, more organized way. Girls also perform better at languages than boys, although the reasons for this are not fully understood.
One thing we have discovered – and this applies to boys as well as girls – is that when they are writing something, they are more likely to write it well if they do not have the pressure of exams, or trying to please a teacher with their work. Students who were asked to write articles for a magazine not only wrote better than they do at school, but also learned more.
A final word, then, about making mistakes. We all make mistakes, and yet, from over ten thousand samples that we looked at on the Internet, we were able to get a very clear picture that girls make far fewer mistakes overall. In emails especially, boys made more mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. They were also more likely than girls to go off the point. So if boys are learning these things in the classroom, they are certainly not putting them into practice!