Research Book: Summary of the book so far Part 5

The last part of the book talks about how something like the way a person sits and what he or she does during a conversation can cause misunderstandings.

Tannen looks into many experiments conducted by other linguists where they have pairs of people of the same gender and of the same age talk in a room while being videotaped.

First, the pair of second grade boys were restless, they were looking for things to do, and they were telling jokes and mocking the adult who took them to the room and told them to talk about "something serious". The second grade girls, however, were the complete opposite : they were sitting still and talking about what they were supposed to be talking about. Tannen explains that this difference goes back to the way boys and girls see the world: boys see the world as a constant competition for status which was why they were doing things like playing around and mocking the adults, girls see the world as a constant struggle to maintain equality and intimacy which was why their conversation was full of words that reassure each other that they are not the only ones experiencing a problem (and they did not play around like the boys because they do not gain much intimacy/equality from it).

The next group observed were pairs of sixth graders . Although the boys do not jump around and stuff like the second graders, they still squirm and move around their chairs constantly and do not feel comfortable. The boys also switch topics constantly. They never sit facing each other and rarely made eye contact; they were looking everywhere in the room except at each other. The girls on the other hand, are almost like their second grade counterparts: they sit still and look comfortable, they talk about one topic and continually reinforces and reassures each other, and they sit facing each other, making eye contact many times.

The next group to be videotaped were tenth graders. The pair of boys were like the sixth graders: they do not sit facing each other and they rarely look at each other, the only difference is that they are completely slumped on the chairs they were sitting on. However, unlike the previous groups, the tenth grader boys talked about person things. As for the girls, they are almost identical to their sixth grade counterparts.

The last group observed was made up of twenty-five year old adults. The women were mostly like their younger counterparts, only this time the struggle to maintain equality and intimacy and avoid conflict is a bit harder.  

The theory that Tannen develops from watching the videos of these conversations is that the men avoid sitting face to face or making eye contact because it is like a "hostile action, a display of threat (269)". They feel comfortable talking to each other while not facing each other at all. Their conversations can be either impersonal and/or constantly changing topics because they dismiss each other's problems as something that is not as bad as they think it is.  Women, on the other hand, face each other while talking because it establishes connection between them. They talk about whatever is on their minds and personal things and they support/reinforce/reassure each other's comments and feelings in conversations because sharing everything means that they are being intimate.

The conflict between the sexes arise when the men and the women judge each other in terms of their own "genderlect". The men and boys do not face each other and they are comfortable with that because it fits into their own logic, but women may interpret this as a lack of interest in the conversation because she assumes that facing each other = good. The men might also see direct eye contact as a sign of flirting, which may be a bad thing for one or both of them. Also,  Women may see the constant dismissing of problems as a sign of not caring while the man sees it as normal, and men can see the reassuring words of women as a sign of being subordinated while women see it as normal. Misunderstandings like these can cause conflicts to spiral out of control and damage the relationships between the people.

The book concludes that the best way to avoid misunderstandings or at least minimize the damage caused by it is to understand how both genders think and speak. It also helps to be a little more like the other gender when talking. More importantly, one must say that he/she must do the changing, not their partners.  

Research Book: Summary of the book so far Part 4a

So this next section of the book deals with Interrupting in Conversations. There are many factors that determine if there is any interruption in the conversation at all and if so, exactly who is interrupting and who is not. Tannen says that to find out, one must know as much as possible about the people speaking and listening (their culture, where they came from, their personalities, etc), the topic, the setting, who is trying to do or say what, and so on. She says that in general, there are two types of people: people who are "high considerateness" who basically do not impose and who give others a chance to speak, and people who are "high involvement" who basically speak enthusiastically and actively (196). The "high considerateness" people would usually wait for a pause in the conversation before they decide to speak, and at the same time, the "high involvement" people would think that those people are silent because they have nothing to say so therefore they should keep talking to keep the conversation alive.

Tannen also explains the difference between overlapping and interrupting: overlapping is when more than one person talks at the same time, interrupting is when the person you are talking to fells they are being cut off from the conversation. Tannen explains that overlapping does not always necessarily mean that you are interrupting, and that not overlapping in a conversation may not necessarily mean that you are not interrupting. For example, Some people can easily overlap each other in a conversation and never feel interrupted, especially if they keep talking about the same subject or overlaps to expand on it. Also, in some cases, even though people might take turns speaking, one person might feel interrupted if someone abruptly changes the subject or says something that makes the person feel ignored. Of course, if someone is overlapping and changing the subject at the same time, people will feel interrupted, and if there is no overlapping and no abrupt change in subject, the conversation will go on.

Are you a prescriptivist or descriptivist?

I will say that I am 70% descriptivist and 30% prescriptivist. I accept the use of those new words and sentence structures, but not to the point where I want to suddenly see all the neologism in the dictionaries (especially if they are only used online) or all the different sentence structures being accepted at once. For me, it's fine to use it for everyday chat, but once it goes into the dictionary and people start using it in like papers and reports, it will really feel like the language is going in the wrong direction. I mean imagine the FBI or whatever powerful government agency using those new words (without using quotation marks) in their official reports.

Research Book: Summary of the book so far Part 3

Throughout the book, Tannen talks about how men listen and speak in the language of independence and status while women listen and speak in the language of intimacy and connection. In this part of the book, she goes into detail about the role that these two "genderlects" play when it comes to lecturing and explaining things.

She cites this experiment conduced by another linguist where he paired men and women together to talk about Children and violence on TV. In some groups, it is one man with another man. In others, it was a woman with another woman. Finally, the third set of groups were made of one man and one woman. Also, before the experiment started, half of the people were given material about the topic to read in order to become the "expert" of their pair. At the end of the experiment, he found that in most groups, the "experts" talked the most, the men who were experts talked more. Another surprising result he found was that in the cases where the woman is the expert and the man was not, the woman almost always seemed to play down her expertise and the man would almost resent the fact that she is the expert. The theory here is that in lectures, men think that being the listener mean being inferior and being the lecturer means being superior. As a result, they would try to argue and debate for the status.

Another interesting part of this book is when Tannen analyzes the times when people respond with "yeah." She says that women say that word when they follow and men use it when they agree. This could cause conflicts because when a man hears that from a woman who in the end does not agree with him, he might think that she was only agreeing but not listening to him. On the other side, when a woman does not hear a man say "yeah," she thinks that he is not listening to her at all because she assumed that saying "yeah" means that someone is following what she said.

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As of now, I am looking forward to reading the chapter on Interrupting, because that also seems to be a very big cause for major conflicts between men and women.