| This study examined questions of sex differences in male and female college teachers' classroom talk. Subjects of the study were 12 male and 12 female teachers at Harvard College. Teachers of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and expository writing were represented in the sample of videotapes obtained from the Harvard-Danforth Video Laboratory. These tapes had been made for the clients of the Video Laboratory who wanted to see their own teaching on tape. Hence, the speech which was examined was directed at students, and not at an experimental situation.;The particular foci of this thesis are: (1) teachers' use of speech items alleged to be the cause and effect of powerless social influence, (2) the role that male-female ratio plays in determining amounts of talk, interruptions, and the sequences of talk by male and female students.;Robin Lakoff's (1973) work on "woman's language" was the basis of four speech categories studied; various studies on the gender composition of discussion groups including those of Aries (1975, 1976) and Kanter (1977) provided the foundation for three others.;Twelve hypotheses dealt with five projections: (1) Female teachers will demonstrate more "subordinate" speech than male teachers; (2) Ratings of the intensity of subordinate speech and patterns of classroom conversation may vary for individual teachers, according to whether they are teaching the beginning, middle, or end of the class; (3) There is an inverse relationship between the amount of individual student's talk and their teacher's frequency of Lakoff's behaviors; (4) The number of subordinate speech behaviors performed by either male or females will be inversely related to the amount of experience a teacher has; (5) Small male/female ratio will influence female students' amount of talk.;The findings of this study suggested there are few differences between male and female teachers in the predicted directions. The hypothesis that female teachers would use more Lakoff's behaviors than male teachers was disconfirmed.;Variation in individuals' speech behaviors made dependent hypotheses impossible to confirm. However, significant differences were found between the talkativeness and interruptability of male and female students. |
