The international PISA studies show that girls, on average, outperform boys in reading literacy (Francis & Skelton, 2005; OECD, 2003), and that Norway is among the countries with the largest gender gap in reading (Marks, 2008). Gender differences in achievement have been studied from different angles, including students’ different learning styles and boys’ laddishness. Here, we omit the structural factors and concentrate on explanations related to students’ role positioning.

During the past decade, the Norwegian educational policy has had an increased focus on oral skills. Traditionally writing skills have been regarded as more important. In the new national curriculum (K06, 2006), oral skills are together with writing skills, ICT, reading, and calculation, defined as one out of five principal competences which the students have to master. Compared to other oral work forms, oral presentations seem to be a frequently used method in Norwegian secondary schools (Hertzberg, 2003; Svenkerud, Klette, & Hertzberg, 2010). The PISA+ video study, which is an observation study trying to explain the Norwegian PISA results, shows that eight per cent of the lessons devoted to Norwegian is spent on oral presentations (Klette et al., 2008). Different research projects (Hertzberg, 2003; Lyng, 2004; Løvland, 2006; Svenkerud et al., 2010) demonstrate that oral presentations undergo much of the same sequential organization. This is: (1) The students start out by working in groups in order to prepare the presentation, often deciding who is going to say what and in what order. (2) Most of the students use audiovisual technical aids like Power Points and overheads to illustrate their points. (3) During the oral presentation the students’ stand together as a group in front of the class, presenting their specific parts one at the time.

Norwegian research indicates that working methods focusing on oral skills mostly are connected to project work. Project work, which normally is “… organized as a combination of group collaboration and whole class presentation (Wikan, Mølster, Faugli & Hope, 2009), is more common than other methods like debates and meta-teaching about oral skills (Hertzberg, 2003). There are, however, two major drawbacks with the use of project work: the students are often passive during each others’ presentations and they often decline cooperation by dividing the tasks into smaller parts which then are distributed between the group members (Wikan et. al., 2009).

We explore gender differences when 9^th grade students (15 year-olds) make oral presentations in class. The students’ role identification can have different impacts on how girls and boys plan and perform their oral presentations. When students make oral presentations in class, they stand out and attract more attention to themselves than they do during regular lessons. Hence, comments and judgments from classmates can be essential in relation to how they prepare, rehearse, and perform their assignments. After analyzing different presentations by looking at the students’ use of verbal and non-verbal means, the main question to be discussed is:In what way does the students’ role positioning affect how girls and boys perform their oral presentations?

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