Academic language of instruction by students in Polish higher education: a contrastive analysis of female and male discourse in presentations

The focus of this paper is to analyse the variation of female and male genderlects in the field of the Polish language, precisely, academic discourse used in presentations given by students of higher educational schools. The analysis is based on the research material gathered by means of surveys and observations carried out among students, as well as interviews with lecturers. The first part concentrates on presenting theoretical knowledge from the scope of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Then, the methods used to obtain the research data are outlined. The gatherings were analysed and contrasted with the findings of previous sociolinguists to see whether any differences between the speech of women and men exist in academic discourse.