DEBORAH TANNEN He Said, She Said Instructor’sInstructor’s PackagePackage

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N I Teaching Guide

This guide is intended to provide an outline,as well as suggested uses and discussion/ questions,for Deborah Tannen: He Said, She Said.

The following pages provide general notes for each section, with key quotes from the video,as well as suggested discussion questions relevant to the section.

The program is divided into seven parts,each clearly distinguished by a section title during the program (with the exception of the first section).

Structure: Seven-part video for easy reference: 1. Boys & Girls 2. Status & Connection 3. Directness & Indirectness 4. Public Talk & Private Talk 5. Ritual Opposition 6. Conversational Style 7. Conclusion

The division of the program into sections will allow you to selectively view desired portions of the presentation,to pause for discussion between appropriate sections,or to view the program in its entirety.

Total running time for this program is approximately 50 minutes.

(Note: Deborah Tannen: In-Depth,the optional companion presentation to Deborah Tannen: He Said, She Said,runs approximately 25 minutes.)

2 BOYS AND GIRLS

Deborah Tannen sets her stage by proposing that we think of between men and women as cross-cultural ,in the sense that women and men grow up in different worlds. Girls and boys not only play differently but also learn to use language in very different ways.

In this section,Tannen shows video clips of a naturalistic experiment demonstrating the different physical alignments that boys and girls establish when they talk to each other. The clips shows pairs of five year olds,ten year olds,and fifteen year olds talking to their same-sex best friends.

(from the video:) And what you see is that,at each age,the girls face each other and have a kind of direct gaze that they create. They keep looking at each other the whole time that they’re talking to each other. And what you see with the boys (the little ones, the older ones,and the oldest ones),is that they sit either at angles or parallel and they look around the room [rather than directly at each other].

Tannen then explains that as children grown into adults,these same patterns continue, leading men and women to misjudge each other’s intentions. A woman talking to a man who does not look directly at her gets the impression that the man is not listening, because that’s what it would mean if she were looking around the room when her best friend was talking to her.

This example sets the theme that is developed throughout the presentation:If you talk to others whose conversational styles are similar to yours,you are safe to conclude that they mean what you would mean if you spoke in that way. But when conversational styles differ, as they often do between women and men, this conclusion can lead to misinterpretation,misjudgment,and miscommunication.

Discussion topics related to this section:

• Describe the key distinction between the ways boys and girls sit when talking to their best friends.

• Why does Tannen open with this example? How does this pattern set the stage for the rest of her analysis of communication between women and men?

Suggestion for outside assignment: Go to an open area at lunchtime or any other location where men and women are talking casually with friends,one on one. Take notes describing the physical alignments you observe. Tannen’s experiment showed only same-sex pairs talking. What do you observe when cross-sex pairs talk to each other?

3 STATUS AND CONNECTION

In this section,Tannen shows candid video footage of girls and boys at play in order to illustrate the different ways they use language.

Girls tend to socialize in pairs,and a common theme i