Researching Gender-Related Patterns in Classroom Discourse

Bibliographic Data

ID10817403
AuthorsDeborah Tannen (0000-0003-0132-5440, Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume30
Issue2
Pages341
Publication date1996-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTESOL Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0039-8322 • E-ISSN: 1545-7249
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3588149
OpenAlexW1540375835
LanguageEN
Citations received13

TESOL classroom researchers have shown increasing interest in examining gender-related patterns of behavior in their work. This interest draws on and contributes to a burgeoning literature on gender and language. It is important, however, to bear in mind that genderrelated patterns dovetail with all the other dynamics of language behavior: Ethnic, class, regional, and age differences all affect speaking styles, along with such influences as sexual orientation, professional training, and individual personality. In designing a study of gender and language, it is tempting to isolate specific linguistic strategies or features, such as interruption, tag questions, indirect speech acts, amount of talk produced, and then audiotape classroom discourse and count up occurrences of those features in the speech of females or males. Conclusions about the meaning of these patterns often seem to follow almost self-evidently. But there are many reasons for which such an approach is not nuanced enough to capture the dynamics underlying gender-related or any other linguistic patterns. First, a linguistic feature that can be used for one purpose can also be used for another, even opposite, purpose. I will illustrate with a linguistic strategy that is particularly relevant to the TESOL class, in which students are likely to have very different cultural backgrounds and consequently very different assumptions and habits with respect to its use, that is, overlap-more than one voice going at the same time. I prefer the term overlap to the more commonly used term, interruption, because interruption is interpretive: It implies that a second speaker is violating the conversational rights of the first, and assumptions about

Linguistics · Pedagogy · Sociology · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Gender Studies in Language · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

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