A Study Of Gender Difference In Chinese Verbal Communication

Gender, as an important issue in sociolinguistics and an important part of interpersonal communication, has received growing attention in recent years. Over the last few decades, many researchers in the West have done much research to study the gender differences in language and they all agree that there could be something different in communicational styles between different genders. Yet Chinese researchers have done a little in this field. What's more, with time going on, there might be some changes in gender differences in communication.The present thesis is an empirical study to examine gender related differences in dynamic communication based on educational levels in Chinese context. The author collects data from Chinese daily conversations in the field of education, and divides them into three groups based on educational levels. Then, by comparing and analyzing the three groups of data on four subjects of communicational styles: topic, interruption, overlapping and question-asking, the author finds out that it is a truth that there are some differences on both genders'communicational styles. Different genders have different topics; men interrupt women more than women to men; while women overlap more and have more questions to ask. The author also draws the conclusion that as time goes on, the differences between the genders'communicational styles may be diminished. And in China, education plays an important role in the changing communicational styles of both genders. The higher one's educational level is, the less different both genders'communicational styles tend to be.Finally, the author provides some causes of the identified gender differences in communication from different perspectives, especially from the cultural and social perspectives and discusses the implications of gender differences to crosscultural communication. She first puts forward three guidelines of cross-gender communication: awaring and identifying, respecting and adapting, and behaving flexibly. Then she offers some techniques in detail to put the guidelines into practice, thus to improve the communication between different genders and make an attempt to avoid some crosscultural miscommunication in our daily life.