Response to Deborah Tannen's Essay

In her essay “Teachers’ Classroom Strategies Should Recognize That Men and Women Use Language Differently,” Deborah Tannen uses the subject of gender to reveal the differences between male and female conversational styles in classroom discussions. Tannen talks about how women tend to contribute less to hostile or debate-like conversations. On the contrary, men debate more in class because the conversational style reflects their own.
Tannen observes the classroom situation, the topic of debate and its format, and men and women’s attitudes toward that topic. First, she explains that as females mature, they use the language to communicate with friends, to whisper and tell secrets. Tannen says that the “telling of secrets, the fact and the way they talk to each other, that makes them best friends” (Reid 283). She states that males are often more comfortable than females when publicly speaking. They tend to gather and communicate in larger groups related to the activiti...