Exploring Covert Gender Stereotypes among EFL Learners The Case of EFL Students of English at Echahid Echikh Laarbi Tebessi University

Abstract

This study explores how students stereotypical preconceptions about the concept of language. Using an updated matched-guise technique, we digitallymanipulated the same recording of a conversation between a male and a female to alter the voice quality of “the female” to sound like a “male” and vice versa. This yielded two nearly identical recording with the genders reversed.Respondent’s evaluation of men and women was based solely on what they hear.The two recording were incorporated into different surveys and heard by twodifferent groups of EFL students (N=47) at the University of Tébessa. Studentsevaluated the two different speakers on 25 traits that were believed to carry gender stereotypes, some related to personal qualities and the other related tolanguage attributes. The analysis of the surveys reveals that there are features that indicated stereotypes, which are shyness, emotionality, dominance, attentive to details, asks many questions, patient, logical, analytical, modest and humble, and direct. Other traits, however, do not indicate any stereotype since both genders were rated neutrally. Hence, the present research suggests that stereotyping is prevalent among EFL learners, which plays an important role in shaping theacademic environment. These findings suggest that importance should be placedon recognizing and challenging gender stereotypes to create a more equitable and empowering linguistic environment for multilingual Algerian EFL learners and beyond. Ultimately, the study foundthat social phenomena can have asignificant impact on students’ evaluation and judgments, so over time these phenomena can change, and other researchers can repeat the same research with other conditions.