Are the Best Language Learners from Mars or from Venus? Gender and Vocabulary Acquisition in the L2 Spanish Classroom

This study examines the effect of Spanish learners' gender on their rate of recall of abstract and concrete words. The experiment included forty-six learners of Spanish who were taught twentyfour new words via an instructional treatment based on L2-L1 and L1-L2 translations. The results of the immediate and a delayed posttest showed no effect for gender on the recall of abstract and concrete words separately, but males did significantly better on the overall recall of all words. These results call into question previous findings and suggest that research on gender and vocabulary learning must use various treatments and assessments to discover what effect gender has and in which instructional contexts.