Gender Differences And Discourse Styles In Intercultural Communication

Cross-gender communication is a form of intercultural communication, a kind of face-to-face communication between people from co-cultures.During the process of cross-gender communication, especially oral communication, men and women differ on terms of phonetics, tone, vocabulary, grammar and others when they communicate. Gender differences are not only reflected on biological differences, but also a kind of cultural construction. Different gender roles acquire them to act in accordance with their own roles and be the members of their own gender groups. Gender cultural differences lead to the differences on communication rules, communication styles, communication strategies, psychological stereotypes, values between men and women. Undoubtedly, these differences will cause difficulties to communication between men and women, even miscommunication. Only having the awareness and being familiar with these differences can we realize the aim of communication and become successful communicators.There are six chapters in this thesis. Chapterâ… briefly introduces the rationale, significance of the study and the summary of the subsequent chapters. Chapterâ…¡first exhibits major studies in this field. Among the scholars, Tannen researches gender differences more deeply on conversation styles. She asserts that the basic use of conversation by women is to establish support and intimacy; for men it is to establish status then defines several key terms, such as gender, communication, gender culture and cross-gender communication so that it is easier for the reader to understand and then At last, the author defines the intercultural communicative competence, its models and its components,Chapterâ…¢illustrates the speech style differences between men and women in communication-in terms of different vocabularies, different sentences, different styles, and different strategies. On terms of vocabularies, women tend to use adjectives and milder exclamations while men use vulgar words. As for the different sentences, men use declarative sentences while women use interrogative sentences. The cross-gender speech styles are a little bit complex. In this aspect, there are the following differences between men and women: men often interrupt the conversation without apology while women often abide by the cooperative principle, listen to others attentively instead of interrupting others; women also response to the speakers immediately while women can receive few responses from men; when problems occur, women will show support and sympathy to the speaker while men try to offer one solution to solve the problem. In the part of different strategies, women often express their opinions indirectly while men always are in a direct way; women pay more attention to rapport while men try to be independent.Chapterâ…£discusses the main factors that cause the cross-gender differences. Socially, women and men have different identities, which are formed by the society. Men should speak like men and women should speak like women. Politically, men have power, including political and social power and women are obedient to men. Power imbalance leads to linguistic imbalance. Culturally, whether men are capable or not depends on their profession, the ability of making money and other ability. In other words, they are evaluated according to what they do. Yet, this is difficult for women. To a greater extent, women are evaluated according to their looks. Just because women are not evaluated on profession, other social status marks including language are more important for women. Psychologically, women should consider others first. Cooperation is the premise of considering others. This psychological tendency is reflected on the use of language: active in putting forward the speech, supporting the others' topics, never interrupting others, applying indirect polite language, etc..Chapterâ…¤points out the influences of cross-gender communication, that is, men and women often misinterpret each other due to cross-gender differences, and then puts forward some suggestions on how to improve cross-gender communication in intercultural contexts. Cross-gender communication is a form of intercultural communication. So how to improve cross-gender communication is how to improve intercultural communicative competence. Here are several pieces of advice: accepting cross-gender differences, learning to be tolerant, learning to respect, learning to be open and flexible. The last chapter is the conclusion. This chapter not only figures out the theoretical and practical implications of the thesis, but also points out the limitations of the thesis and directions for further research.