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In Deborah Tannen's essay, "Gender in the Classroom: Teachers Classroom Strategies Should Recognize That Men and Women Use Language Differently, she talks about the ways that male and female students participate in different exercises in the classroom. She also describes the way boys tend to interact by throwing hard words and on the other hand girls talk in smaller groups. Girl shares everything with their best friend. Before I began writing to show the differences I must say I agree with her what she showed here. Her essay is based on an experiment that she made and her information is what she observed. As an example is in the third paragraph when Tannen states, "Typically, a girl has a best friend with whom she sits and talks, frequently
“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.
At birth, we are a blank slate, regardless of gender. We are introduced into a world that wrongly believes gender defines who we are and what we shall be. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel impacts our minds and how we react. Therefore, behaviors between the sexes are learned from our interactions with the opposite sex and how we, as individuals, see our world. In the literary piece, The Distrust between the Sexes, Karen Horney asks this question: “…What special factors in human development lead to the discrepancy between expectations and fulfillment and what causes them to be of special significance in particular cases” (Horney)?
In today’s society, it can be argued that the choice of being male or female is up to others more than you. A child’s appearance, beliefs and emotions are controlled until they have completely understood what they were “born to be.” In the article Learning to Be Gendered, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet speaks out on how we are influenced to differentiate ourselves through gender. It starts with our parents, creating our appearances, names and behaviors and distinguishing them into a male or female thing. Eventually, we grow to continue this action on our own by watching our peers. From personal experience, a child cannot freely choose the gender that suits them best unless our society approves.
Gender Matters is a collection of various essays on feminist linguistic texts analysis, by Sara Mills. Mills develops methods of analyzing literary and non-literary texts, in addition to conversational analysis based on a feminist approach. The author draws on data from her collection of essays gathered over the last two decades on feminism during the 1990s. The essays focus on gender issues, the representation of gender in reading, writing, and in public speaking. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of feminists’ analysis of sexism in literature and the relation between gender and politeness. The article is informative for my research paper, as my topic is going to cover language analysis of the text and who women reading and writing differs according to the discourse analysis within linguistic, psychology, case studies audiences and surveys. The book would be helpful, particularly the last three essays that discusses gender, public speaking, the question of politeness and impoliteness in public speaking. Mills’ analysis is not complete without including the idea of global notions of both women and men, to see whether women and men write and read in the same way globally. Therefore, an update would enrich the book’s discussion section. Although, Mills addresses the class and race theme in language and public speaking, I will only look into the role of language that plays a part in doing or reducing gender in literary, non-literary texts and in conversation.
In recent years, gender differences have already been one of the most controversial issues in various research. As an important communication tool of mankind, language is inevitably involved in controversies. However, Rachel Rafelman, a Canadian journalist and the author of “The Party Line” express her thought and opinion in her essay. She not only have some great points on what and how women and men are likely to talk, but also have different points on the talking environment. She comes up with facts and fit real and particle examples in her essay to make it understood. Whereas, Ronald Macaulay, a professor of linguistics and the author of “Sex Difference” uses words of novels to argue and promotes them as a cause of reinforce to men’s and women’s stereotypes in his essay. He argues through his whole as rebuttal and gives some examples to oppose the preconceived notion of sex differences. Over all, both Rafelman and Macaulay are the good writer but Rafelman is having upper to prove her essay better organized using her tones as per requirement.
She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue. In this article, she focus on woman are judged and estimated by the way they dress. She emphases on “there is no unmarked women.” First, the article starts by observing three womens dress. During the observation, Tannen discovered that women are making deliberate decisions on their appearance to avoid the judgment from men. In addition, Tannen also pointed out a new meaning of the word “marked.” Marked is a word usually used to change the meaning of a word by adding a linguistic participle that has no meaning on its own. But in her article, mark is the way to divide male and female. Most of time, men can choose styles that are marked, but they do not have to, and in this group none did.（142） Moreover, “Ms” and “ Mrs” are the big part that showed women has been judged according to Ralph Fasold’s research. Furthermore, Tannen has also presents that males were born with modified female bodies. Through out her writing, Tanne are talking about the inequality between genders could be seen as a feminist, which is the purpose of this essay. However, she is unhappy that women cannot be unmarked. Some days, she just want to get dressed and go about here
It is also important to consider the role of gender stereotyping, attitude and classroom behaviour, and consider how these affect the learning process. In this essay I will discuss the key issues and the reasons behind this underachievement, the ways these can be addressed at school level and the impact these have within the classroom. Boys and Literacy It is a common belief that historically girls perform better in English than boys. Past and present research support this theory as the table below illustrates.
1. Discuss gender (not physical) differences between boys and girls. Discuss how parents, teachers, etc. treat children differently based on their gender. Be sure to give personal examples in your discussion.
Therefore, the teacher has to find different methods of organization and education to maintain order in the classroom. The differences between boys and girls in interest, maturity, games, reactions, form of socialize and express feelings is quite different, which requires a teacher to focus on his personality type and gender, for example, boys usually tend to be much most troubled from childhood to adolescence, as they show the cases of abuse and bullying, thus, the teacher have to give more attention and use different ways of discipline and organization, girls tend to be more responsible, organized and independent, that is why teachers choose different tasks for girls. All this makes the male and female students should have a different way of teaching and control
Sadker, Myra, David Sadker, and Susan Klein. "The Issue of Gender in Elementary and Secondary Education." Review of Research in Education 17 (1991): 269. JSTOR. Web. 14 Mar. 2012.
In the essay "How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently" by Deborah Tannen, she describes how females and males differ when they both use and respond to language or certain speech patterns, especially when the setting is in a classroom. The author notices how the males tend to act or be more aggressive and assertive with their language and action especially when in bigger groups they tend to compete when they voice their opinion. Opposite of the males, females are more delicate when they speak and when in bigger groups they hold back their voice but end up feeling more comfortable to talk in smaller groups more than likely with other females. Tannen tests her theories in her class and they seem
Language Development When it comes to the effects of gender on language development, one of the most frequently asked questions is: do males and females develop language differently? Studies have shown both similarities and differences between male and female language development. Apel and Masterson (2001) explain that both genders acquire language skills along the same timeline and that both become active, engaging conversationalists. Although research has shown both similarities and differences in language development, pertaining to gender, a major influencing factor has come from parents. Observations have shown that during the different stages of language development, parents tend to use different types of language with males than with females, which continually affect an individual throughout his or her entire life.
In this article, Shaw and Lee describe how the action of labels on being “feminine” or “masculine” affect society. Shaw and Lee describe how gender is, “the social organization of sexual difference” (124). In biology gender is what sex a person is and in culture gender is how a person should act and portray themselves. They mention how gender is what we were taught to do in our daily lives from a young age so that it can become natural(Shaw, Lee 126). They speak on the process of gender socialization that teaches us how to act and think in accordance to what sex a person is. Shaw and Lee state that many people identify themselves as being transgendered, which involves a person, “resisting the social construction of gender into two distinct, categories, masculinity and femininity and working to break down these constraining and polarized categories” ( 129). They write about how in mainstream America masculinity and femininity are described with the masculine trait being the more dominant of the two. They define how this contributes to putting a higher value of one gender over the other gender called gender ranking (Shaw, Lee 137). They also speak about how in order for femininity to be viewed that other systems of inequality also need to be looked at first(Shaw,Lee 139).
Same sex classes make it possible for teachers to cater to student needs in a more efficient way. In general boys benefit from hands on learning, but girls benefit from calm discussions (Mullins 3). Girls tend to doubt themselves while boys think they can do anything. Boys need to be brought down from the clouds while girls need to be dug out of a hole (Mullins 3). David Chadwell says, "Structure and connection are two key concepts when examining gender in the classroom. All students certainly need both, but it seems that teachers need to consider the issue of structure more with boys and the issue of connection more with girls" (7), and Kristen Stanberry’s research has shown, "Some research indicates that girls learn better when classroom temperature is warm, while boys perform better in cooler classrooms. If that's true, then the temperature in a single-sex classroom could be set to optimize the learning of either male or female students" (1). These observations further support the idea that same sex classrooms can cater to student’s...
Pearson, J. C., Turner, L. H., & West, R. L. (1995). Vocabulary, Questions, and Dominance: Verbal Communication and Gender. Gender & Communication (3rd ed., pp. 145-164). Madison, WI.: Brown & Benchmark.