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Lesson 2
Boys and Girls in Class

Guidance

It’s widely believed that in the way of learning, girls are more careful while boys tend to be sloppy.Do you think so? 人们普遍认为女孩学习更认真一些,男孩学习可能更粗心一些。你觉得呢?

Are there gender differences in the way boys and girls learn? This is a question that parents, teachers, and educational psychologists have asked themselves for many years.

For some time, people thought that some difference between boys and girls result from difference in the way they are raised. For example, parents ofte give young boys toy trucks to play with, while young girls get to play with dolls. But cross-cultural studies have shown that giving toy trucks to girls and dolls to boys didn’t change essential differences in their personalities. Many researchers agree that there are natural male-female differences including difference in learning styles.

A high school choir director tells a significan story about learning style differences With the girls, he’ll begin teaching a new song by sharing a story about why the composer wrote the song or who it was written for. “Giving the girls some context, telling them a story about the piece , gets them interested. Th boys are just the opposite,” he said. “If you start talking like that with the boys, they’ll start looking at their watches, and they’ll start getting restless. The one of them will say, ‘Can we please just learn the song?’ ”

Another differenc in learning styles is the way boys and girls relate to teachers. ①Most girls want to study hard so that they can please their teachers. Girls are usually more interested than boys in trying to please adults. Pleasing adults is not a strong motivation for most boys,however. Boys are usually less interested in studying unless the material they are studying is really interesting to them.

Girls and boys also react differently to unsuccessful learning experiences. Girls tend to think that if they fail in something, they have disappointed their teachers and parents. When boys fail a test or a class, however, they don’t see their failure as having any wider implications.The failed the test; they failed the class. That’ all it means for them.

In studies of students’ report-card grades, researchers found that girls generally do better than boys in all subjects and in all age groups. But interestingly, this does not make girls more confident than boys. Girls tend to have higher standards for themselves and to judge their performance more critically than boys do. And boys tend to have unrealistically high estimations of their own academic abilities and accomplishments.②Girls need more encouragement from teachers than boys. Boys, on the other hand, ofte need a reality check.The need to understand that they are not always as brilliant as they think they are.

This important point to take from this research is that there are no differences in what boys and girls can learn. But there are significan difference in the ways they learn and their attitudes toward learning.

(484 words)

Notes

① Another differenc in learning styles is the way boys and girls relate to teachers. 男孩和女孩在学习方式上的另一个差异就在于他们与老师之间的关系是怎样的。

② And boys tend to have unrealistically high estimations of their own academic abilities and accomplishments. 男孩往往不切实际地高估自己的学术能力和成就。

Practice

Ⅰ. Reading comprehension

1. Which of the following best explains the main idea of the text?

A. Boys are better than girls in some subjects, and girls are better than boys in other subjects.

B. Boys and girls learn in differen ways, and they do not have the same ideas about learning.

C. Girls get better grades in school because they have a better attitude towards learning.

D. Girls and boys are interested in learning differen things.

2. According to Paragraph 3 boys show no interest in the following aspects of the song except in.

A. the story behind it B. the background knowledge of it

B. who the song was written for D. the song itself

3. How many examples does the writer use in order to illustrate the difference between boys and girls in learning styles?

A. One.B. Two.C. Three D. Four.

4. Th underlined word in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to _____

A. minor B. slight C. great D. similar

5. What is the writer’s main purpose of writing this article?

A. To give advice on how to teach boys and girls.

B. To persuade teachers to teach boys and girls differently

C. To compare difference in learning styles between boys and girls.

D. To teach boys and girls how to be successful learners.

Ⅱ. Vocabulary in use

Use the words or phrases in their proper forms to complete the following sentences.

Ⅲ. Writing practice

Conduct a survey on the differen learning styles of boys and girls in your own class. You can use questionnaires or do interviews. List your results and findings iL0S8L0iH7H0EbP25FjzW8uYtpXgALIflPaT+kiaT+Pj6rkgLU4njO04WHrkJFMS

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