Gender And Senior Students' Discourse

The discourse system of intergender cut across culture and generations, corporate culture and professional specializations, since women play an important role in modern social life. Research on gender discourse could help understand and master the characteristics of the discourse between men and women in order to decrease both misunderstanding and miscommunication among men and women, simultaneously promoting fluent and harmonious communication. It is certain that the speech behavior in boys' and girls' primary life have strong effect on their future life, gender influences the children's language ability and culture stereotype when children are learning foreign languages, namely, boys and girls are quite different in language acquisition.The thesis demonstrates the short history of research on gender discourse, deeply analyzes the distinct gender discourse system in order to uncover what bring about the different discourse. Boys and girls develop differently in turn-taking, silence and speech style, eventually I draw the conclusions as follows: 1) In the senior school, female teachers and senior students frequently interrupt and overlap male senior students' speech, even though sometimes boys take turn at holding floor. 2) The interpreting of silence of men and women is seldom the same. 3) Generally speaking, women who are concerned with intimacy, connection, and inclusion, will tend to focus on more attention on the use of language as a way of communicating relationship;men, on the other hand, because of their focus on independence, status, and exclusion, will favor the informational function of language. Focusing on different function is reflected in senior students' discourse. The history of the discourse of men and women and misinterpretations which arise in communication between them is tied up in the historical development of the Utilitarian ideology.