How Male And Female Students Use Language Differently Deborah Tannen Summary

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Tannen’s primary focus of her linguistics research is the language of everyday conversation. In this essay “How Male and Female Students use Language Differently”, the authors purpose is to understand how male and female conversational styles influence discussion in the classroom, and how they’re different ways of using language to communicate. Tannen argues that most classrooms dynamics are “fundamentally male”. In her essay Tannen claims that males tend to speak more in the classroom and work better in large groups. She also says that males respond better to debate like discussions. Tannen concludes her essay by doing an experiment with her class by breaking them into small groups to analyze their own conversational transcripts.

First Tannen claims that males tend to speak more in the classroom and work better in large groups that are hierarchical, as oppose to females who tend to remain quiet in the classroom and work better in smaller groups of people they know. Since working in large groups, is putting oneself forward into a crowd of strangers, and women feel that they will be judged by their knowledge and intelligence by their verbal display. Tannen states “that boys are expected to use language to seize center stage: by exhibiting their skill, displaying their knowledge and challenges and resisting challenges”. (369) I get where she is coming from by saying that males tend to speak more in