A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Adults’ Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech.

Leaper and Ayres’ 2007 meta-analysis examined 63 published studies that were methodologically sound (e.g., actually sampled data instead of relying on intuition) and peer-reviewed in either journals or books. The authors examined not only the amount of words spoken by each gender but also categorized the amount of words spoken into two categories: affiliative speech, which is primarily concerned with the sociocultural relationship of the interlocutors (e.g., compliments, back channeling, and probing questions); and assertive speech, which is persuasive or controlling (e.g., criticism, explanations, and, in one case, a verbal threat). These two categories are similar to James & Drakich’s (1993) “cooperative” and “dominant” styles of speech. The authors ran separate tests for single-sex versus mixed-group results and also removed the outliers at 10% and 20%. Leaper & Ayres concluded that, overall, “men were significantly more talkative than women”; however, “as predicted, women used significantly more affiliative speech than men” and “men used significantly more assertive speech” (p. 351). These findings do not corrorborate James & Drakich’s (1993) findings. In certain contexts, Leaper & Ayres (2007) found women to be more talkative than men, notably when a child was present or children were the topic of conversation, and during self-disclosure. The authors note that these are stereotypically envisioned as female domains, and so women’s talkativeness fit into our society’s gendered norms.

Tutors as Teacher: Assisting ESL/EFL Students in the Writing Center

by thonus

General stuff: contrastive rhetoric, conflicting agendas. Its main benefits is that separates ideas about teaching ESL into 3 categories: Focus on form (contrastive rhetoric), focus on the writer (first negotiate meaning then the client self-corrects grammar; good references here), and focus on the reader (writing for academic community).

Understanding gender differences in amount of talk

To my knowledge, the earliest meta-analysis to examine which gender speaks more was James & Drakich’s chapter in Gender and Conversational Interaction (1993). They found that most studies found that men speak more than women, and their findings did not support the widelyheld view that men’s speech is “dominant” and women’s speech is “cooperative.” This was probably the most widely cited meta-analysis, although it only surveyed 56 studies; meta-analyses published since have examined more and do not support James & Drakich’s findings.

Does the GRE predict meaningful success in the graduate training of psychologists?

by Sternburg and Williams
at Yale

They tried to correlate GRE scores with grades, professor ratings, and dissertation ratings.

"In sum, GRE scores were found to be modest predictors of first-year but not second-year grades in our graduate program, both for men and for women. However, only the GRE Analytical test score was found to predict more consequential evaluations of student performance and only for men."

Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

by Stephen Harper

Romero says that malls and a consumer culture make us into zombies.

Raising the Dead

by Kyle Bishop in http://heldref-publications.metapress.com/media/6a86qnuqypdxfqqyhnr2/contributions/3/4/6/k/346k07hv3887qrhn.pdf

An examination of why zombies fascinate us. Goes into history: from actual Voudan practice to the film WHite Zombie, then pulp comics, then Romero.

Zombies reflect our fear that deep down we are nothing but appetite. They are uncanny in Freudian sense because they are dead, and yet they move. They sometimes have the faces of our friends and family who have been turned.

They are essentially cinematic because they are so graphic.

The Power of Gender Ideologies in Discourse

by Susan U. Phillips

In Tonga, there are 3 gender ideologies: sister-brother, wife-husband, and sweetheart-sweetheart. The mother-son or father-daughter relationship is not as important. In Tonga, sisters are superior to their brothers, but husbands are superior to their wives.

Phillips goes over different ways of interpreting gender ideologies in a historical literature review.

INterest in gender ideologies began in the 1960s and 1970s, when feminists took Marxist philosophy and replaced class with gender. Lakoff brought the argument into linguistics.

Anthropology reformulated the argument in terms of public and private spheres, dichotomizing male and female spaces. Keenan/Ochs paper on Malagasy falls into this genre of research.

The anthropological literature found that female discourse often took the form of specific genres. The identification of genres led to interest in the diversity of gender ideologies.

The underlying basis of all this research is the idea that women have different thoughts than men.

More recent: gender ideologies as related to class and race, the gendering of workplaces, in terms of communities of practice and institutions, and in nations.