Use of Questions in English Lectures: Are There Gender Differences?
The use of questions as an interaction facilitator by lecturers in tertiary education has been investigated in several previous studies (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2008; Morell, 2004). However, the issue how gender difference influences the use of questions in English lectures has received very little attention. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate gender influences on lecturers questioning in terms of question function and form. The corpus used in this study consists of 12 English lectures collected in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Four lectures (two by female lecturers and two by male lecturers) were selected from each of the following three academic divisions—Humanities & Arts, Social Sciences & Education and Physical Sciences & Engineering. The results of this study show a clear distinction between female and male lecturers in terms of question use. It was found that female lecturers asked far more audience-oriented questions to involve the audiences participation both literally and metaphorically than their male counterparts. On the other hand, male lecturers asked remarkably more content-oriented questions, in which they seemed not expect response from the audience because they often answered the questions themselves. In addition, the question forms used by these lecturers also demonstrated gender differences. Although both female and male lecturers mostly used wh-questions to realize content-oriented questions, they behaved differently on the use of audience-oriented questions. While female lecturers employed prominently more yes/no questions to interact with the listeners when raising audience-oriented questions, male lecturers used more wh-questions to realize the same function.
Wei-Ling Liu Yu-Ying Chang
Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics,Yuan Ze University
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
403-414
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）