Deborah Tannen “how Male and Female Students Use Language”

D M

Eng 112

September 25, 2016

How Male and Female Students Use Language

In her article “How Male and Female Students Use Language Different,” The Chronical of Higher Education, June 1991, Deborah Tannen uses the focus of gender to acknowledge the variances that occur between male and female conversation styles that happen during classroom discussions. Do male and female students really use language differently, or is it their culture and the way they go about speaking amongst themselves and to others that is different?

The author talks about how girls like smaller groups and "it's the significance of the way they speak to each other and the secrets they share that makes them best friends", but when men talk to one another it is the flinging of insults and hostile environment that intrigues them into conversations. Tannen also debates how classrooms use "argument and challenge" and many females do not like this type of conversation and shy away from it while men enjoy the direct challenge.

Tannen makes some good points in this article, but I feel they are a little bias. She describes some of the ways that both genders are different, but leans toward how conversing with the males group is easier because they participate more frequently. Women are habitually stereotyped to be more expressive, preferring to talk in smaller groups or same sex groups about issues and their emotions, but at the same time men are also stereotyped to be more of a direct to the point communicator. Only two different things were deliberated in this article, the participation and discussion in the classroom, nothing pertaining to how a female student might be more comfortable in the classroom, like reading assignments or presentations to class. Those things that may be more appropriate to female learning are not even discussed, to me this is showing how the classroom leans more towards the needs of male students versus female students.

Tannen also tries to persuade her readers that males and females have different ways inside the classroom by describing a little experiment that she had in her own class. The way the groups were broken down was a good way to start to see how they divided themselves and started to open up, but yet there still is the fact that even in smaller groups men like to debate and try to dominate. There were some females that became more communicative and were capable of engaging in debate and be quite bold while in smaller groups, but still one student quotes “I was overwhelmed by how talkative the female students were in the female-only group”. I wonder if culture also plays a role into the differences of male and female language also. In those countries that are male dominant, does this cause low self-esteem in the woman to carry over into the female student’s college and professional life? The article states that there were eleven female students and only one woman was a talker, while mentioning that another five female students did not speak at all, but does not mention the culture of these women.

Male students demonstrate characteristics such as dominance, autonomy, and aggressiveness which leads to strong connections between the “perception” and “action” areas of their brains making them more outspoken in a classroom. Most female students display more empathy and nurturing qualities which makes them think longer about what is being said and how it is being said because they care more about what is being thought about what they are saying and what others will think of their opinions. This is a reason why some female students feel incompetent in a classroom full of male students who speak out in classroom.