Different regional, ethnic, and class backgrounds, as well as age and gender, result in different ways of using language to communicate. Researches show that girls and boys learn how to use language differently in their sex-seperate peer groups. Boys mostly are expected to use language to seize center stage, by showing off their skills, knowledge, and challenging others. Where girls usually have their few girlfriends around where they communicate differently. Telling secrets and sharing issues with one another. They even go into different cultures between men and woman. Greece and Bali engage in ritual laments. This is spontaneously produced rhyming couplets that express their pain, over lost ones or loved ones. Men there do not participate in laments. They do a very different ritual, such as war of words in which they vie with each other to devise clever insults. It is not just Americans who do this it is a pattern all over the world. Woman bond by talking about their troubles and men bond by exchanging playful insults and put downs. Now of course not every body is like this, but there is a pattern.
This professor evaluates his students and how the girls and boys react differently to conversation and debate in class. In some cases he sates that men speak more than woman is because they find the "public" classroom setting more conductive to speaking, whereas most woman are more comfortable speaking in private to a small group of people well known. Women students in this class admitted if they speak up once or twice, they hold back for the rest of the class because they do not want to dominate.
In some cases I feel he is evaluation how woman do not like to be dominate, but it all depends on the person. I know a lot of woman who can run the conversation in a classroom, while some of the other females do not say a word. Same goes for men. I can connect with this piece though, communication between men and woman are totally different and will always be.
*** This Email was sent by a student at Lima Senior High in Lima CIty School District.
I read that essay and I did agree with some points. I agreed that women talk about their problems more to each other while men joke about each other. What I didnt agree with was that women don't talk much in classroom discussions. In all of my classes since I can remember, the females have been the ones to speak first in the classroom. They were the ones who you could never shutup. The males would just sit back and wished not to be called on. I was left confused after reading this essay because what I experience each day contradicts the essay.
ReplyDeleteI can see this pattern everywhere. Whnever us girls get stuck in a conversation with mostly males, it is normally a topic that has to do with violence or war and if not that they are insultin eachother and laughing their heads off about it. Us ladies however, if someone were to insult us we most definitely wouldnt be laughing about it. We prefer to express ourselves and compliment eachother on our outfits and hair.
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