123 GENDER DIFFERENCES IN RECOUNTS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH BY SPANISH PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENTS 1 ANA MARTÍN ÚRIZ LAURA HIDALGO SUSANA MURCIA LUIS ORDÓÑEZ KARINA VIDAL RACHEL WHITTAKER Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ABSTRACT. In this paper we present an analysis of the representation of gender roles in texts written by Spanish Secondary School (Bachillerato) students of EFL. This work is part of a larger research project on the relationship between knowledge of genre and writing quality in the UAM corpus of interlanguage writing. Here, we examine a sub-corpus of recounts from the point of view of the presentation of the writers in the texts, their centrality, and the roles they assign themselves and others. We work in the framework of systemic functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and genre theory (Martin and Rothery 1980-81; Martin 1992; Rothery 1994; Martin 1997; Rothery and Stenglin 1997; Martin and Rose 2003). We use the Systemic Coder (O’Donnell 2005) to record and quantify the features we analyse. The analyses show how, despite the limitations of their language, these young EFL writers reproduce dominant cultural patterns in their representations of gender. KEYWORDS: EFL writing, secondary school, representation of gender, differences, recount. RESUMEN. En el presente artículo se examina la representación de género en textos escritos por alumnos de ILE en Bachillerato. El trabajo forma parte de un proyecto de investigación más amplio en el que el objetivo final es analizar la relación entre conocimiento de género textual y calidad de la escritura en el corpus de la UAM de escritura en interlengua. En este trabajo analizamos los relatos en el corpus desde el punto de vista de la representación de los escritores en los textos, a través de los papeles semánticos que eligen y que asignan al otro. El trabajo se desarrolla en el marco de la gramática sistémica funcional (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) y la teoría de los géneros textuales (Martin and Rothery 1980-81; Martin 1992; Rothery 1994; Rothery and Stenglin 1997; Martin and Rose 2003). Se ha utilizado el Systemic Coder (O’Donnell 2005) para el análisis de los rasgos de los textos. En el estudio, se muestra como, a pesar de la falta de recursos lingüísticos, los estudiantes reproducen los patrones culturales dominantes en su representación de género. PALABRAS CLAVE: Composición en ILE, bachillerato, representación de género, diferencias, relato. 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper we analyse gender differences in the representation of experience in compositions written in English by Spanish pre-university students. In a writing task designed to produce a personal recount genre, we examine the linguistic resources these young non- native writers of English use to describe the events and to present themselves and others in their texts. By studying the students’ use of the stages of the generic structure of the text, and the types of processes and semantic roles in the texts, we find significant gender differences in the way male and female students in their late teens represent the event, and their actions and feelings, as they describe them to their readers.