Gender and discourse

Masculine talk. According to Braun, men:

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  use more directives;
  
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  behave more competitively in conversations;
  
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  talk more colloquially and make greater use of dialect;
  
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  less grammatical and more elliptic;
  
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  less emotional, more factual use a greater amount of locatives and terms relating to quantity
  

There are some attained opinions from researches conducted by scholars:
‘Men swear more, talk less about emotions, talk about sports more, talk about women and machines in the same way, insult each other frequently, are competitive in conversation, dominate conversation, speak with more authority, give more commands, and interrupt more.’ (Moore, 2003)
‘Men tend to dominate public talking time. Men tend to see language more as a tool for obtaining and conveying information. They see talk as a means to an end, and the end can often be very precisely defined – a decision reached, for instance, some information gained, or a problem resolved.’ (Holmes, 2013)
‘Men are more likely to stutter and to have reading disabilities. They are also much more likely to suffer aphasic speech disorders.’ (Chambers, 1992)
Feminine talk. According to Lakoff (1973) women more likely to:

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  pursue topics initiated by others
  
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  use positive feedback, build on and develop each other’s points and agree
  
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  be polite; repair the conversation after a silence
  
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  show they are listening by using minimal responses
  
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  speak less than men in mixed sex conversations
  
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  use more tag questions; use wh-imperatives
  
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  can’t tell jokes; personalize language
  
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  use expletives e.g ‘Oh dear’; avoid making threats and using aggressive language and insults; apologize frequently
  
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  avoid slang/ taboo language
  

‘It is of interest, by the way, to note that men’s language is increasingly being used by women, but women’s language is not being adopted by men’. (Lakoff, 1973, p50) A study at Harvard’s aimed to know how gender impacts the quality of teaching and learning. The study was conducted in video lab, spending one to review lectures from 24 instructors (12 male and 12 female) with teaching experience from 8 weeks to 36 years. The study found:

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  male students talk more often and 2,5 times as long when the teacher is also male;
  
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  female students spoke almost three times as long with female teachers; women are more vulnerable to interruption than men;
  
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  in female-only groups women take turns speaking equally; in male-only groups males tend to compete for speaking time and the amount of time spent speaking varied greatly between males.
  

Baraja-Rohan (1997) explained the relevance of conversation analysis to L2 teaching to enhance the learning of L2 conversational skills. She demonstrated that sociocultural norms were reflected in openings, closings and adjacency pairs (e.g. greetings, leave-taking, invitations, and requests); consequently, focusing on these concepts made L2 sociocultural norms salient to students who could then employ them in L2.