The objective of this study is to use the sample collection to prove five hypotheses specifically targeted for college students from the perspective of gender differences。 It is based on the previous studies on blogs and microblogs as well as researches of relationship between language and gender by some famous linguists。 For instance, in Robin Lakoff’s book Language and Woman’s place (1975), he put forward strategies for language and gender and Deborah Tannen (1990) raised “rapport-talk” in females and “report-talk” in males in her book You Just Don’t Understand- Woman and Men in Conversation。

The research objects are 120 college students in Hangzhou who have Sina microblog accounts and tweet quite often。 Three reasons lead to why college students are selected to be the subject。 Frist of all, college students are at the age of 18-25 years old, constituting a majority of microblog users and most of them are monthly active users; secondly, to some extent, microblog is exclusively tailored for college students who have a passion for new fashion and desire to express their minds and emotions freely and independently; finally, the study may help the construction of moral education in college if it shows obvious gender differences in language use on microblogs。来自优Q尔W论E文R网wWw.YouERw.com 加QQ75201.8766

In order to know how much work has been done in the field, related books, journals and theses will be collected。 After literature review, the research objectives and methods of the study will be fixed。 The author will use the user’s personal information of birth, location and educational background to identify the research object and send private messages on microblog to confirm the authenticity of some information if necessary。 The data will include microblog’s profile which contains microblog’s name, personalized introduction, portrait and contact information, the 40 newest focused accounts and 10 newest original posts。 Collected profiles can show how much personal information users would like to make public。 The 40 newest focused accounts can be classified to explore what topics the user is mostly interested in。 From analyzing the 10 newest original posts, the frequency of using online buzzwords, intensifiers and auxiliary words that indicate mood and emoticons can be counted。 After all the samples have been sorted out and reorganized, this statistics will be employed to use SPSS to testify the proposed hypotheses。

1。3。 The outline of the thesis

The thesis will include six chapters。

The introductory chapter presents the motivation of the study and general description including the objective, the object and research method and the outline of the thesis。 Previous study reviews both at home and abroad will be talked about in chapter two。 It will specifically mention the main framework on gender differences。 Four theories will be introduced briefly: Deficit Theory, Dominance Theory, Difference Theory and constructivism theory。 Chapter three raises the five research hypotheses that need to be testified。 Chapter four follows on the data analysis of the samples and chapter five attempts to give an explanation to gender differences on language use from the psychological and social & cultural perspective。 The last chapter has a discussion of the gender differences in the Chinese language use on Sina Microblog and the deficiency of this study。

2。 Previous study

The last several decades have seen an explosion of researches on the nature and existence of differences between men and women。 One particularly popular question has been the extent to which men and women vary in language use。 This popularity stems, in part, from the truth that language is an inherently social phenomenon and can provide insight into how men and women deal with their social worlds。 Numerous studies have been done in this field both at abroad and home。