Deborah Tannen Gender In The Classroom Summary

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“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. Tannen points out “a greater percentage of discussion time is taken by men’s voices.” (2) She tells us why this is a disadvantage to the women in the classroom. She then continued to separate the two genders into their given stereotypes. Girls tend to separate themselves from large groups; they talk amongst …show more content…

She analyzed conversations among her students to find out what helped them in becoming engaged in the classroom discussion. The class she chose as her subject had eleven women and nine men. Tannen said that she observed the class for a good amount of time when she concluded that almost all the men talked in class occasionally. The student who talked the most in class was a woman, but then she mentions almost half of the women did not speak at all in class. Tannen decided to divide her class in ways where she could prove her thesis statement that having both genders in the same classroom is an issue. She analyzed the students, separated them into three groups that are relevant to each, from their degree, gender, and the conversation style that she observed from each student. Naturally, she focused on how the all-woman group became talkative once the men were gone. At this point of her essay, she focused too much on what she was trying to prove with her thesis statement rather than really giving the readers to consider the other side of the story. As Tannen goes on with explaining the experiment she conducted in class, she started to divert with including the ethnicity of some students. The foreign students tend to talk less despite what gender, therefore counting the validity of their contribution out. The information provided towards the end of the essay started to become irrelevant. This part of her essay was very weak, showing some obvious bias as she was sharing the information

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