Gender Differences In The Conversation Organization Of Chinese College Students' Dormitory Talk: A Conversation Analysis Approach

It is a gradual process that gender as a non-linguistic variable receives attention from researchers. Most early sociolinguistic work concentrated on linguistic variation in relation to social class of the speaker and speech style. Linguists soon realized that gender as a non-linguistic variable was involved in structured linguistic variation. In sociolinguistic studies there are two main approaches to gender differences in language: the dominance approach and the difference approach. The first approach sees women as an oppressed group and interprets linguistic differences in women's and men's speech in terms of men's dominance and women's subordination. The second approach emphasizes that women and men belong to different subcultures, which leads to gender-related differences in language. Besides the sociolinguistic approach, researchers also have adopted the pragmatic approach and the conversation analytic approach to the problem. The former is aimed to provide a pragmatic explanation of gender differences in observing or violating pragmatic principles. The latter employs a theoretical and methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) to investigate gender differences in conversation organization. Up till now, western linguists have carried out numerous studies of gender differences in language and a great number of findings have been achieved. However, relatively little empirical work has been conducted to analyze gender differences in the conversation of Chinese women and men. There seems to be especially a dearth of studies adopting the theory and method of CA to explore gender differentiation in conversation based on data gathered from everyday communication of Chinese people.The present paper makes an attempt to explore possible gender differences in the conversation organization of male and female college students in China by analyzing college students' single-sex dormitory conversations. The following questions are addressed: 1) Are there any differences between female students and male students in the use of minimal responses as supportive feedback? 2) Are there any differences between female students and male students in organizing turn-taking in theconversation? 3) Are there any differences between female students and male students in the use of overlaps in the conversation, concerning the positions where overlapping talks appear and their relevant interactional tasks? Thirty-two students in Zhejiang Normal University, with sixteen boys and sixteen girls in four dormitories respectively, were involved in this study. Students hi each dormitory were asked to tape five spontaneous dormitory talks in a relatively fixed period of time before they went to bed. From the total of forty conversations, twenty (ten from female talks and ten from male talks) were selected for analysis. The results show that the generally supportive minimal response "11", including its lengthened and repetitious forms, only appears in male's dormitory talks. However, female students tend to offer generally supportive minimal responses immediately after the current speaker finishes her turn construction and often provide generally supportive minimal responses to the same speaker recurrently within the same conversation. Moreover, highly supportive minimal responses frequently appear in the talks of female students, but not in male students' talks. As to the turn taking rules, males apply rule l(c) of Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson' turn allocation rules more frequently than females, that is, if the current ' speaker has not selected the next speaker, and no other party selects him or herself as the next speaker, then the current speaker continues speaking. As far as overlaps are concerned, more overlaps take place in male's dormitory talks than in female's talks. The results also indicate that overlaps appear in two positions in female's conversations, while in male's conversations overlaps take place in four positions. In addition, the relevant interactional tasks of overlaps in male's conversations are different from...