Gender and Technological Practice in Electronic Discussion Lists

The Influence of Gender on EFL learners’ Discourse Functions in a CMC Environment

“…This finding suggests that females in the same-gender groups dominated the synchronous CMC interactions, lending support to the reports that females in the CMC dominate the interactions by producing more discourse of different types, such as lexical or functional discourse (see AbuSeileek and Rabab'ah 2013;Bani Younes 2014). However, this finding contradicts other results that indicate that males dominate online interactions by producing more discourse, i.e., speaking or writing more (see, for instance, Herring 1994; Richardson and French 2000;Shehadeh 1999;Sierpe 2000). Females in the same-gender pair groups (FF) also produced more discourse than males in the same-gender pair groups, which seems consistent with them producing more discourse functions in the mixed-gender groups (FM and MF).…”

“…Moreover, females in both same and mixed-gender groups obtained higher means than males in asking questions, correcting moves, giving explanations, indicating empathy and sympathy, agreeing with or supporting others, and complimenting their partners, which emphasizes females' cooperativeness. This observation might link with the observation that females' style tends to be cooperative and meek and tends to express socioemotional ideas while males' style is argumentative, competitive, authoritative, and non-cooperative (see Herring 1994;Sierpe 2000;Guiller and Durndell 2007;Cameron 2009aCameron , 2009bHayat et al 2017;Pakzadian and Tootkaboni 2018). Thus, such gender differences between males and females may be accounted for in prior gender studies (e.g., Lakoff 1973;Holmes 1992;Al-Shlool 2016) as females produced discourse functions that are less direct and challenging than those produced by males, and they also used more polite words than males.…”

“…For example, male discourse functions are generally characterised as competitive, argumentative, boastful, and critical, whereas female discourse functions are described as cooperative, facilitative (i.e., agreeable), supportive, and praising (Holmes 1992;Tannen 1994;Tannen 1995;Cameron 2009aCameron , 2009bPierson 2015;Hayat et al 2017;Pakzadian and Tootkaboni 2018). Similarly, some studies found that males tend to dominate conversations, whether CMC or regular ones, and issue orders, which is not the case for females (e.g., Tannen 1995;Kilbourne and Weeks 1997;Richardson and French 2000;Sierpe 2000;Yates 2001;Guiller and Durndell 2007;Lindsey, Carmeens and Caldera 2010;Hayat et al 2017;Pakzadian and Tootkaboni 2018). Other studies, however, took a somewhat different line by experimentally proving that females dominate online CMC conversations (see AbuSeileek and Rabab'ah (2013);Bani Younes (2014) or by reporting that girls, not boys, tend to argue about the rules of games, boast about their skills, and issue orders to other girls and boys (Goodwin 2006).…”