More handpicked essays just for you.
Difference between male and female communication style
Difference between male and female communication style
Gender differences in communication styles philosophy
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Deborah Tannen is the author of “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently.” This article was published in the “Chronicle of Higher Education.” Tannen is the author of several books explaining how individuals engage in conversation. Her argument is that in a classroom setting, males engage in more conversation than females. She challenges different teaching styles, and she determines that an individual’s conversation style is relative to the situation they are in. She uses examples from a book by Walter Ong and from several sociologists and anthropologists. Tannen uses formal language throughout her article. One of Tannen’s main claims is that in the classroom setting, males engage in more conversation than females do. She agrees
In the Article “marked women”, Deborah Tannen explains the social manner of judging women by their appearance or other factors, but not judging men for the same reasons. Tannen uses her observation during a conference meeting of four women and eight men to analyze how each woman in the meeting was marked while men were not. Again Deborah points out the issue of how one gender writing about the other is either portrayed as prejudiced or sexist.
“Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” as the famous saying of John Gray goes. It is believed men and women are nothing alike in almost every aspect. In Deborah Tannen’s essay “Gender in the classroom: Teacher’s Classroom Strategies Should Recognize that Men and Women Use Language Differently” she focused on how men and women differ when it comes to communicating, with emphasis on how it effects to how men and women behave in the classroom.
Specifically, in the classification essay, “But What Do You Mean?” by Deborah Tannen, she discusses the various types of relationships men and women have with each other. Men and women often react and expect different things from one another, which leads in misinterpretation. For example, categories in romantic relationships such as breakups, responsibilities, and sex. Breakups usually occur in most relationships and there are different ways men and women go about it, such as responsibilities in relationships, which consist of the role men and women play such as who is the man of the house, and how sex which takes parts in many relationships.
Fourth, men appreciate verbally competing more than ladies; on account of this distinction, ladies can feel that they are being assaulted in a discussion. Fifth, ladies and men use commend in an unexpected way. Ladies have a tendency to expect to be congratulated doing a job, while men tend to believe that not saying anything is good enough. 6th, woman talk about their issues so as to share their encounters; they complain not to have their issues comprehended but rather to empathize. In the other hand, men don't see the complaints as discussion yet as issues to be understood. Lastly, men and ladies have a tendency to contrast in jokes. Men incline toward teasing and fun loving abuse while ladies favor funniness that is more self-censuring. Because of these distinctions, ladies can misjudge men's silliness as antagonistic. In conclusion Tannen closes by expressing that distinctions are not wrong, simply diverse—and that perceiving these distinctions may help men and ladies convey all the more
According to Borker and Maltz (1982) women and men of America are from varied sociolinguistic cultures and have learnt conversation rules differently. Language rules are taught to children at an early age. Little girls work and interact within small homogeneous boys-girls groups and make supportive comments whereas boys go for bigger groups and make challenging comments. When they group up, these patterns continue and sometimes misunderstandings occur due to such differences. Women nod head to encourage speaker whereas men consider it to be a gesture for agreement. Men do not nod and women consider they are not listening. Women tend to use questions to continue or start off a conversation and men think it is because of less knowledge of women. Even though females give more affective response, still where nonverbal communication is concerned...
of a classroom? Well, it has been said that women and men have diverse ways to communicate
Worthern further advances her claim by utilizing specific experiences of different professors. For example, she states the encounters from a Math professor Mark Tomforde as well as an English professor Angela Jackson- Brown to provide different perspectives to support her claim of the exacerbated use of informal language in conversing with professors. Professor Mark Tomforde reflects a moment,“There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviation was the level of informality, with no address or sign off.” Through the narration of Professor Tomforde, who has taught over twenty decades, Worthern presents a believable witness of the transformation of how students address to the professor. It highlights students’ informality has exceeded the limit of being acceptable in a college environment in addition to the gradual disappearance of the value of respect. Similarly, Professor Jackson-Brown recalls, “deference has waned ...I go out of my way to not give them [ the students] access to my
In her article “But What Do You Mean” Deborah Tannen, claims that there is a huge difference in the style of communicating between men and women. Tannen breaks these down into seven different categories; apologies, criticism, thank-yous, fighting, praise, complaints, and jokes. With each of these she compares men to women by explaining the common misconceptions that each of the genders do. The different style of communication can cause some problems at the workplace and even affect the environment. The different styles of communication has been around forever and almost becomes a “ritual”(299). Tannen is effective with mainly women and not men. She is primarily successful with women due to the fact that her tone targets women, also the organization
If there is anything I have learned after joining the military, it would have to be the ability to pick up on my superior’s indirect cues. However, I did find it quite interesting reading that subordinates generally are more indirect with their superiors, such as in the case of the pilots and co-pilots presented within Deborah Tannen’s writing. For me at least, being quite direct without losing politeness or respect for the individual being spoken to seems to be quick and efficient, rather than having to drag out conversation longer than need be. While I don’t mean to sound boring, I do feel that being direct can paint clearer pictures or present situations in a brighter light for clarified understanding. Though it is true that my superiors
From a young age, we have heard the phrase “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus,” but exactly how much truth does this adage hold? Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, sought to solve this question in her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, from which the excerpt “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently” is taken. In this, Tannen analyzes how men and women behave in the classroom, and classifies the distinct behaviors that she noted into male and female conversational styles. The male style, as the author describes it, resembles a competition in which two or more parties vie to get the upper hand, and win the argument. In contrast, the female style contains more relational
After reading the different studies and research in the chapter I have a much different view than before. I reflected on my whole life and noticed that when I am in a more private and relaxed setting my wife usually does a lot of the talking. But in more formal settings like when we attend seminars together or when we took a college class together, I am doing more of the talking. This is just one example of how this study actually reflects my everyday life. Another example of how this chapter changed my view is the way male and female speech occurs in my class. I was really taken back from my teaching and I noticed that this is true of my classroom and I didn 't even know this! Many times when a girl answers a question or tries to provide her different insight of the question provided I sense that many feel she is trying to show off. This chapter honestly will helped me get rid of many assumptions I 've always had. I will also try to ensure all my students have the social confidence in my classroom and try to help all students contribute to the
Lieberman, Simma. “Differences in Male and Female Communication Styles” Simma Lieberman Associates (undated). Retrieved February 25, 2010<
Tannen, D. (2007). You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York, NY: Harper.
The book An Intorduction of Sociolinguistics is an outstanding introductary book in the field of sociolinguistics. It encompasses a wide range of language issues. In chapter 13, Wardhaugh provides a good insight to the relationship between language and gender. He explains gender differences of language-in-use with concise examples. Wardhaugh riases questions about sexist language and guides readers to look closer at how people use language differently because of their own gender in daily life. According to the Whorfian hypothesis, which indicates that the way people use language reflects their thoughts, different genders adapt different communication strategies.
The use of dialogues in language teaching has a long tradition. Stereotyped dialogues and dialogues in unnatural language have been recently replaced by more natural dialogues, which illustrate how sentences are combined for the purpose of communication in clearly defined (specific) social context.