you lucky thing - getting to do Gendered Langauge for a year (note sarcasm)
actually you will find its not that bad an elective.
as for starting to study the module what you should be doing is taken some notes regarding Tannen's thesis.
Best way to do this is split them up into chapters and summaries the main points of each chapter (its basically the title of each sub section). Then find yourself a quote which tannen sums up this point (usually teh first or last line of the sub section)
i haven't picked up this book since the HSC so forgive me if this is incorrect but just to give you an idea you would have say
Conflict - main title
Men and Men - sub title in text (all those mini chapters within each major chapter)
"men see conflict as the chance to build status" - the quote something that Tannen says
once you have done that you will have done pretty much everything that you need to do for Tannen for the year - you dont' need to constantly read the text cause these points you will appy to all your other material.
you could also start looking at related material and seeing how this fits into what Tannen says. Take a look at your summary and see if any of those points relate to a peice of material you like - and then summaries it under the Tannen heading - doing the same thing providing an explaination and a quote.
Trust me this is the easiest and most effeict way to study this module. As you really need to know Tannen's points quiet well.
The main ones you will be looking for are the basic difference b/w men and women's linguistic styles (found in the intro and first chapter) then you can pick and choose from any one of the following; conflict, metamessages, status, support, aims of conversation, plus a load more
a good thing to also look at are some other linguists. you will need factual nonfiction material other then Tannen to back up your claims - this shows your wide reading. This is a thing i did for it last year - its got some really good quotes for your essay. Using other linguist is really impressive for your markers as it shows you are willing to explore Tannen's theories.
this should give you a good starting point for all your research on the topic. Use the holidays to get started on ur summary of Tannen - that is probably the most improtant thing you need to get done - otherwise you will find studying the texts very difficult.
bty - what texts are you doing?
hope all this is helpful for you - if you need anymore advice or anythign feel free to pm me - i'm glad to help out those who have to do this
cheers mel
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Gendered Language – Sociolinguistic’s quotes
In Search of Authority ‘Feminist Literary Criticism’ - “Language as an institution seems to bare a heavy imprint of patriarchal culture”
Danielle Louise – “a culture’s language and language forms and reflects that culture. In part our language helps shape our beliefs and expectations our very sense of reality”
Elizabeth Aries – Men and Women in Interaction considering the differences
“…Feminists have been arguing that gender varies with status and social roles in our society, that the differences between men and women that we have attributed to gender might be better account for by status differences”
“Gender varies with social roles and experience. We have divisions of labor that allocates different work and responsibilities to men and women. Many gender differences in social behavior may be better attributed to differences in the social roles played by men and women”
“…To the characteristics of the participants, their relationship to one another, the length of the encounter, the task and the interaction setting”
“What we universalize as gender differences in communication…may only describe communication patterns for white, middle-class males and females of a certain age. Gender is shaped by our race, class, or culture”
“Gender is one of the primary categories we use to understand the world around us. When we enter into any conversation, based on discernible visible cues we recognize that each participant we are interacting with is a man or a woman”.
Bing and Bergvall - The Question of questions, beyond binary thinking
“Although language is essentially categorical, ‘in the world of experience all boundaries show some degree of vagueness, and any formal system which is used for semantic description must allow us to record, or even measure, this property’”.
“The many real-world continua hidden by language suggest a question: is our automatic division of humans into female and male as justified as we think? Are the boundaries between them as clear as the words female and male suggest?”
“Feminist scholars have pointed out that although the majority of human beings can be unambiguously classified as either female or male…because the terms female and male insufficiently categorize our experience, English also includes…negative connection often associated with these words”
“There is considerable evidence that variables such as race, social class, culture, discourse function, and setting are as important as gender and not additive or easily separated”
“The belief that there are separate women’s and men’s ways of speaking reinforces the social myth that males and females are fundamentally and categorically different”
“Individuals who fail to fit the strict female-male dichotomy are either ignored or subject to boundary policing. Groups that inhabit or stretch the boundaries of restrictive gender roles either become taboo or are labeled aberrant”.
Criticism of Tannen
“…and Tannen You Just Don’t Understand, emphasis differences, minimize similarities and largely ignore unequal power or status”
“Such books reinforce stereotypes and mask the fact that female and male language and behavior form an overlapping continuum rather than two distinct categories”
Bergvall – An Agenda for Language and Gender Research for the Start of the New Millennium
“It thus directs little attention to the great degrees of variation possible both within and outside the fairly narrow circle of white, middle class North American society it attempts to characterize”.
Lakoff
“Rough talk is discouraged in little girls more strongly than in little boys, in whom parents may often find it more amusing than shocking”
Andreas Schramm – Criticism of Lakoff
“Lakoff’s claim was that women have little or no power in our society and that their language reflects this status in society. She concluded that women’s language was ultimately bad. The counterargument claims that women are group-orientated and supportive of others”
“Their language reflects the values and attitudes of their culture and therefore is powerful and cooperative, it is ‘good’”.
Mara McGinnis
University of Buffalo Reporter – Women need to be more direct, men must ‘listen more actively’
“Over the past 30 years, we have come to know that words do not reflect reality, but rather act as structures through which we view the world”.
“There are societal expectations about when or where women should talk. Women are assumed to talk about small things, which is often perceived as too much talk or gossip”
Allan and Barbara Pease
Why Men can only do one thing at a time…and women never stop talking
“The only way a women gets ride of a problems from her mind is by talking about them and acknowledging them”
“When a women shares her problems at the end of the day, she doesn’t want interruptions with solutions. You are not expected to respond, just to listen and offer support”
“When a women shares her problems at the end of the day, she doesn’t want interruptions with solutions. You are not expected to respond, just to listen and offer support”
“For a women, speech had a clear purpose; to build relationships and make friends…not to solve problems”
“For men, not talking is perfectly natural”
“For men, to talk is to relate the facts. Men see the telephone as a communication tool for relaying facts and information to other people, but a women see’s it as a means of bonding”
Suzanne Romaine – Communicating Gender
“Language is part of mans nature…what we find in the world are men endowed with speech, speaking to other men, and language gives the clue to the very definition of man”
“Gender is thus an inherently communicative process”
“How girls are brought up to talk like ladies, while boys are expected to talk and act ‘rough’.
Sotirin – ‘All they do is Bitch, Bitch, Bitch. Political and Interactional features of Women’s Officetalk
“…The importance of communicative connections in working women’s lives, the pleasure of getting together to talk about each others troubles; the ways bitching can give emotional expression to and some sense of relief from the troubles that preoccupy women’s hearts at work”
“..specifying bitching as a form of interpersonal talk, distinguished from relative forms of women’s informal talk including gossip, complaining and ‘trouble talk’”.
“People use linguistic resources to produce gender differentiation how people enact the norms that define the linguistic performances of properly masculine and feminine identities and how, when and where they change, transgress, and subvert their norms”.
Walter Wolfram – Language as Social Behavior
“Linguistic anthropologists view language as a form of action through which social relations, cultural forms, ideology and consciousness are constituted”.
“Language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior”
“In the normal transfer of information through language, we use language to send vital social messages about who we are, where we come from, and who we associate with”.
“Language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behavior and human interaction. The notion is simple, but the ways in which language reflects behavior can often be complex and subtle”.
“The relationship between language and society affects a wide range of encounters”
“Language as a social institution”
“The study of language in its social context tells us quite a bit about how we organize our social relationships within a particular community…”
