摘要：In the recent years there has been a striking shift in both academic and popular discourse on the subject of male–female differences. The present paper reports a study which carried out to investigate how both gender groups of EFL learners deal with language difficulties during speech by focusing on the hesitation strategies they employ. Obviously, the effective use of a target language to build interpersonal communication where communicative failures naturally occur, involves the effective use of communication strategies. This study mainly focuses on the pattern of hesitation strategies in oral L2 test among a group of Iranian university students at a public university in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as EFL participants of the study. Adopting a qualitative research, a group of 12 Iranian university students including 5 males and 5 females were selected as the subjects of the study. The findings of this research contribute to a descriptive account of the type and frequency of hesitation discourse markers used by the participants in problematic moments of L2 oral test in consideration of their gender while struggling with language difficulties across different sections of an oral L2 test.
关键词：hesitation strategies;gender;EFL learners;oral test
