English Learning Resources: November 2015

Tuesday, 24 November 2015

You Tube link to Chas & Dave "Rabbit"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaGDGlS9E9w

You can see that the majority of comments on the video are from men with one in particular saying 'love the lyrics on this video'. This clearly is a song aimed at belittling women, which somehow made it into the charts!

3 D's

Dominance

Jennifer Coates
Coates looks at all female conversation – builds on ideas from Tannen
Pamela Fishman 1983
(Fishman) tag q’s set an agenda, disagrees with Lakoff (Fishman believes tag q’s are used to start conversation)
Interrogative syntax
“Females use tag questions to gain conversational power rather than as a sign of tentativeness”

Deficit

Robin Lakoff
‘Language and Woman’s place’ 1975
No precise statistical evidence
Observed women’s speech
Nature v nurture
Suggests tentative explanations
10 ‘women use’ explanations. E.g. women use… hedges and empty adjectives
Differences were socially rather than biologically constructed
Janet Holmes (1992) suggested tag questions are used to be polite

Difference

Deborah Tannen
‘You just don’t understand’ 1992
Status v Support, Conflict v Compromise, Independence v Intimacy etc
Deborah Cameron suggested language difference is a cause of situation not gender
Coates – all female talk is cooperative (supports the speaker)
Coates – women and men had different socio-cultural experiences
Tannen suggested women form bonds and avoid conflict