Gender Differences In Communicative Styles-from Social Cultural Perspective

Study on gender differences is an important branch of sociolinguistics.With time development,communicative phenomena and social and cultural factors interact with each other greatly.It is of tremendous influence on discovering complicated social factor and profound cultural significance in verbal and nonverbal behaviors by comparing the differences between male and female in communicative styles.The thesis is devoted to the contrastive analysis on male and female communicative styles in order to contribute to some extent to further understanding on sociolinguistics,and decreasing misunderstanding due to gender differences in communication.Communicative style refers to that verbal or nonverbal behaviors demonstrate a series of communicative features which are influenced or conditioned by different communicative contexts.Appropriate exertion of communicative style not only acts as a positive stimulus,but also plays a significant role in the cultivation of communicative competence.Besides revealing the differences between male and female in communicative styles,the present work also analyzes the basic reasons of these differences.The paper serves the purpose of further understanding the gender differences in communication styles,finding out the profound reasons causing communicative misinterpretation,and promoting effective cross-gender communication.The method adopted in the present work is known as contrastive analysis method.The thesis analyzes communicative styles of male and female in verbal and nonverbal communications.Furthermore,the analysis of misinterpretations due to gender differences leads to the result that the essential reason causing misinterpretations in male-female communication is that male and female do not understand each other's communicative styles.At the same time,the thesis points out corresponding solutions to these misinterpretations,in the hope of helping people enhance their awareness of gender differences,improve their communicative abilities,avoid or decrease misinterpretations and conflicts in cross-gender communication,and carry through communication more effectively. The thesis is divided into six chapters.It is structured as follows.The first chapter serves as an introduction to the whole paper and starts with the relationship between gender,communication and culture.Then it introduces the theme of the paper and states its purpose.It ends in indicating the overall development of the whole paper.Chapter two is literature review,mainly focusing on the achievements, significance and existing problems in the study on gender differences.Chapter three concentrates on different characteristics of male and female in verbal and nonverbal communications.Chapter four elaborates the reasons causing gender differences. Chapter five proceeds to analyze misinterpretations due to gender differences and provide corresponding solutions.The last chapter is the conclusion which sums up the main points of the thesis and points out some problems which need further study.