Exploring the collaboration in men's and women's talk

Abstract

Many studies of gender interactions have discussed differences in masculine and feminine conversational styles. Collaborative talk has been regarded as a feminine conversational style. Recent research shows that collaborative talk occurs in male and female conversations. Thus, this present study investigates collaborative talk between men and women to see: 1,whether collaborative talk is a characteristic of women's talk or it is found in male conversations only; 2,if men show collaborative features in their conversation, whether men use collaborative features in their talk similarly or differently to women. This present study was undertaken using mainly qualitative methodology complemented with some quantitative analysis. In order to identify trends of collaborative features, the quantitative approach was adopted. The qualitative approach was used to discuss how collaborative features were delivered by both male and female participants in this study. In the qualitative approach, Discourse Analysis (DA) and Conversational Analysis (CA) were adopted. DA was used to accommodate gender questions in interactions. CA was used to examine how each collaborative feature was employed by participants. The data for this present study was collected in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and included including male and female participants, aged between 25 and 35 years. A total of 12 everyday conversations were collected for the analysis including five men only conversations, three women only conversations and four mixed gender conversations. The results of this study show that both male and female participants employed three collaborative features: one sentence construction, one sentence expansion, and repetition. Both men and women showed both similar and different ways of incorporating these collaborative constructions. This result suggests that collaborative talk is not only women's feature in talk but also it can be a men's feature in talk.

Date of Award	2010
Original language	English
Supervisor	Eleni PETRAKI (Supervisor), Nicolette Bramley (Supervisor) & Jeremy Jones (Supervisor)