Gender And Language Style In CMC: Major Features Of Students' Weblogs

The present study aims to examine gender and language features in students'weblogs, to investigate how language is used to express ideas and feelings and how emotive features are communicated in Computer-mediated Communication (CMC).The study investigates issues of online gender and language among 40 students'weblogs. The results indicate that there is no difference in personally identifying information and topic choices for male and female bloggers. However, in the aspects of language use and emoticon features, male and female bloggers have different features respectively.Introduction presents the general content and the structural outline of the thesis. Chapter One provides a review of the literature on gender and language. Chapter Two describes the research methodology including research design, data collection, data process, and the results. Chapter Three discusses the results and implications. Final part concludes the study, demonstrates the limitation and suggests the future of related researches.This research study provides a variety of insights into the ways how men and women interact with others in online settings, contributes to the new research background for communication, and enlarges the scope of sociolinguistic theory on gender and language. Practically, the relationship of language features and gender differences in CMC can contribute to the distant education.