The use of adjectives in between male students and female students: A corpus-based analysis

This research is a corpus study conducted to analyze and evaluate the adjective usage of 8th grade students according to gender. It is aimed to determine the frequency of adjectives and adjectives that are most frequently used by gender in the essays and exams written by the male students and the female students in the 8th grade at Mehmet Bayır Imam Hatip Secondary School, which is a public school in Karatay, Konya. The research enables to understand the importance of adjectives and to understand whether there is any difference in the use of adjectives in between genders. Key Word in Context (KWIC) was used to analyze the frequency of adjective use in the texts written by the students. Log-Likelihood (LL) was used to determine whether there was a significant difference in terms of adjective usage of the male students and the female students, and overuse, underuse values. As a result, it was determined that the frequencies of the adjectives and adjectives used by the male students and the female students in essays and exams were relatively different. In addition, it was indicated that the most used adjectives were "bad, best, good".