Is It Really True That Women Speak Differently From Men?

Abstract
The relationship between language and gender has long been the research topic of general interest in sociolinguistics. With the growth and the development of the feminist social movement in the 1960s, western scholars and sociolinguists have done a lot of researches on the gender-differentiated use of language. Despite the various kinds of researches concerning gender differences in language in the past few decades, most researchers seem to neglect the importance of the context in which communications take place. As a result, the studies of gender and language seem to suffer from the problem: abstraction or generalization. What's more, how to explain speech differences between men and women still remains a question in dispute among sociolinguists. What the present dissertation intends to do is to carry out a contextualized research of speech differences between men and women in the English language, to explore the origins of the speech differences and to discuss the significance or practical implications of the study.
With the analysis and discussions, the author offers some considerations with regard to the significance of the study. On the one hand, the communicative problems between men and women can be avoided with better understandings of the different conversational patterns. On the other hand, men and women can benefit a lot from learning from each other. Finally the author points out that the present study is one of the attempts to represent the new direction of gender difference studies in language, hoping that the present study may bring some new insight in the study of gender difference language studies.
Key words: gender, speech differences, public contexts, conversational analysis

Titles of Assignment:

1.Is it possible to define a standard spoken English? And does anyone actually speak it? You will need to discuss the question of standardisation and draw conclusions with respect to its various aspects: standardising across dialects, standardizing across social classes, the reasons why governments and educators try and standardise, the nature of a 'standardized' product etc.

2.Can spoken language ever be grammatical? Or is "grammar" only for written language? This is partly related to Q1, but the viewpoint is a bit different. You will need to consider different senses of 'grammar' and 'grammatical'(e.g. Does it imply correctness? What people actually do? Social desirability?etc etc.) You also need to think about what people do when they talk. Lastly, you can if you wish draw conclusions about what FL teachers might do.

3.Is it really true that women speak/talk differently from men? Comment on the major differences that have been proposed and discuss how far it is reasonable to generalize in terms of gender (i.e. think hard about the meaning of the 'really'). The assignment can relate to English, or you can bring in comparative information about other languages.

4.Analyse a short conversation
Record 3-4minutes of a conversation (involving more than one person). Transcribe it. State and comment on your transcription procedure and system. Analyse the structure and content of the conversation. You do not need to carry out a full Conversation Analysis, but you must comment on : turntaking, use of preference organization, listing, use of figurative language, topic change, face saving, breakdowns and repairs and dysfluency. Make sure you describe anything of particular interest that happens and make sure Appendix 1 is the transcription codes and Appendix 2 is your actual transcription. (The transcription counts towards the grade)

5.Analyse a joke or anecdote
Record someone telling a longish joke (3mins). Transcribe it. Comment on your transcription system. Analyse how the speaker handles the flow of information to reach the punchline. Consider how any characters are introduced to the listener. Look at how the speaker handles the listener's expectations. Look at how the punchline is handled. Comment on any interesting uses of language and intonation. Make sure you include the transcription conventions as Appendix1 and the joke itself, either as part of the text, or as an Appendix. It is often a good idea to interview the teller ( and even listeners) and add that information to your account.

5a. A text-based variation might be to compare, say, children's jokes in English and another language.

6.If you had to teach someone to be ironic and sarcastic in English, what features would you teach and why?
Note that this topic has teaching built in to it-so you need to think more than just linguistically. This is a really interesting topic to explore, as irony is generally ignored in most FL teaching. (It can be hard to know where to start looking for references, though, so I have prepared a short help sheet. Either aske me for a copy, or look in the Malle Resouces File.)

7.In what ways are word boundaries problematica?
In particular, how far do native speakers of English vary as regards the words they treat as compounds?
Find a way or ways of testing some speakers, test them, evaluate the tests and analyse the answers. Include an evaluation of the Brown&Hatch test.

8 How much variation is there in the way different dialects/varieties of English mark relative clauses?

9 Foregrounding and backgrounding
Find a written or spoken text. Identify what is salient and what is backgrounded. Show how the aouthor achieves the effect(s) and suggest reasions why. You could also try and track how readers (L1 or even L2) actually progress through the text and what they report noticing.

10 Explore the use of figurative language in a text.

10 a Metaphor
Choose a text of interest, or an extract of about 500-1000 words; it can be from a news paper/ magazine, the Internet or a children's book. Identify the metaphors. Describe your identification procedure and comment on it ( try and use more than one person to identify). Comment on patterns in the data. Look for extending conceptual metaphors, clustering, demetaphorisation, and manipulation of reader-writer relations.

10b Hyperbole or extreme case language
As above. You might want to examine a set of advertisements (or even compare 2 sets)

11. Compare the metaphoric structuring of time, argument, communication or fear in English and another language.
Remember to comment critically on any published analysis you make use of, and to state who your informations are. Try and interview/test real people, not just dictionaries, grammars and academic articles on metaphor!