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Deborah Tannen Essay

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“We are all the same.” People always said. But is this really the case? For people, are we really all the same between men and women? Do men and women really linve in same worlds? When people say “same”, it’s about the way we communicate, about our lifestyle and emotions.
Deborah Tannen, 1990, strongly believes that men and women have different ways of communicating. Tannen believes that the best way to describe communication between the genders is in a cross-cultural format. She called this, Genderlect theory of Deborah Tannen. This theory mostly focuses on how the two genders, male and female, are made of different things and how both genders has contrasting styles, in terms of the way they communicate. According to Griffin, E. (2009), there …show more content…

Women’s desire for connection, men’s desire for status. Women engage in communication to build and maintain relationships with others. By contrast, men are more likely to engage in talk only when it makes them look good, strong, or independent. Second, Style of Communicating: Women use rapport talk, men use report talk. Women express emotions, share personal feelings, relate stories, and listen with emotions, that is rapport talk. Men engage in competitive joking and definite speech that control of the conversation is report talk. The third one is speech communities. The different ways women and men talk reflect their separate cultures. The role of women and men in social development is different, thus they have different social roles. Last but not least, Language. We speak the same language, but each gender has its own words. Each gender has its own set of vocabulary and preferred topics, and they use spoken language differently. Men talk to get things done, however, women talk to interact with …show more content…

(2009) gives the very new and clearly point that “Whereas Lakoff’s analysis was political in nature and stressed how women’s language needs to change and become stronger in order to disrupt inequalities between the sexes, Tannen’s explanation stressed that the differences needed to be revealed and understood so that communication between the sexes could be improved. Tannen engages the concept of culture to bolster her central proposition. She has likened the impact of male-female differences in language codes to the challenges of intercultural communication by introducing opposing key concepts that guide women’s and men’s production and interpretation of language.” Tannen asserts that women stress connection and intimacy, and men stress status and independence. This “two languages/two cultures” approach stressed female and male differences, contrast to Lakoff’s socialization approach, male dominance be

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