During my first attempt at exploring language, I chose to study gender, in particular, focussing closely on Tannen's Difference theory. I find this topic one of the most interesting out of the whole English Language course and using YouTube for my source selection gives me a great, diverse range. I may choose a similar style of investigation for my coursework. Below is my first attempt at a written language investigation:
I have chosen to study gender, particularly focusing on Deborah
Tannen’s Difference theory which makes assumptions about the differences
between male and female speech. Due to the large number of differences Tannen
notices, for example, men give advice while women show understanding, I knew I
would be able to identify lots of examples in my data. My hypothesis aims to
prove if the theory is actually
applicable to male and female conversations.
My data will consist of YouTube videos I have transcribed. The
benefits of this are that the videos I have used contain natural speech because
I have used cast interviews from the TV show ‘Game of Thrones’. I have found it
beneficial to use cast interviews as opposed to one cast member speaking to an
interviewer because it shows a wider range of genders and their speech. Having
more than two individuals in the data gave much more data for me to explore and
I could even compare two people of the same gender and their speech. This
allowed me to notice more of Deborah Tannen’s findings in the speech as a
opposed to a limited amount that would appear in interviews with just two
people.
The selection process is simple, I typed ‘Game of Thrones
interviews’ into the search bar and selected every other video to transcribe,
so the first, third and fifth videos to make the sample fair and systematic. As
the videos vary in length, I decided to transcribe the first two minutes of
each video as a method of selection. Two minutes gave me a generous amount of
speech to transcribe, but not too much that it was time consuming, or not too
little that would be difficult to analyse.
The first video I transcribed was male dominated and contained
little female speech, as was the second video which contained no female speech.
However, the third video contained a large amount of female speech due to the
three women being shown, against only one man. Although this was unavoidable
due to my fair method of selecting data, I could have improved this factor by
transcribing more videos to obtain a larger amount of data.
In all three clips, men conform to Tannen’s theory about men giving
information, for example, “I’m gonna ask the first question, then there’s gonna
be an informal Q&A” in the second text which spoken by the male
interviewer. This feature also applies to females which contradicts the theory,
for instance, “it’s been shown at exactly at the same time on both sides of the
Atlantic” which is said by the female interviewer. However the cause of this
could be a result of the style of video because it is imperative for the
presenters to provide their audiences with a large amount of information. So it
can be considered unavoidable for both genders to give information.
The female contradiction of information in this theory is feelings,
which again, seems to be dominated by males as opposed to females. The actor,
Jack Gleeson, expresses feelings in the first interview, for example, “I was
very intimidated.” In the same interview, Pedro
Pascal also expresses his feelings such as, “I felt like I knew more about the
show than anyone else on the show.”
However, this could be due to the fact that these clips were mostly male
dominated so the females had little time to express their feelings.
The males showing a
large amount of understanding (opposing the Difference Theory), could also be a
result of the male dominated clips. Understanding worked alongside feelings in
the interviews as the male interviewed often tried to understand what certain
actors were feeling. For example, “one thing that’s lovely about your
performance… is that you’re both villains in the peace but neither of you
approach that all and I think it really shows the characterisation,” said in
the first interview. “Poor chap,” in the third interview from the male
presenter also shows understanding of experiences. In the second interview, the
interviewer shows understanding towards the audience and their situation, “I
know you’ve already been waiting a very long time in the rain.”
The second male-only
interview shows some elements of an attempt to gain status which conforms to
the theory. The presenter often says, “I’d like to thank you” or “could I
please welcome,” and puts emphasis on himself as opposed to using “we” which
would be more appropriate as he is part of a large organisation hosting the
interview. In a more apparent attempt to gain status, actor John Bradley makes
a joke regarding Kit Harrington’s previous comment about his favourite TV
shows. “They’re not strictly speaking TV shows are they?” which Bradley does to
embarrass Harrington while at the same time gaining status by mocking him and
making the audience laugh to win them over.
Repetition frequently
occurs which could symbolise a lack of independence because certain speakers
just copy what the others are saying. For instance, all three women in the
third interview repeat “yeah” one after another at one point during the clip.
Another example is in the second interview, creator Dan Weiss says “Kit” and is
then repeated by David Benioff while they both attempt to be funny by making
Kit Harrington answer an awkward question. This, in fact, can show status of
trying to be humorous as mentioned in the previous paragraph, but at the same
time contradicts the theory as the male creators are not showing
independence.
Although my method of selecting data by transcribing the first two
minutes is ideal when trying to avoid ‘cherry-picking’, it also meant that a
large amount of data I transcribed was only introductions and the conversation
had little chance to progress. As the videos are interviews, the presenters
often introduce the characters and inform the audience about the programme
which gives little opportunity to show natural speech. It can also be suggested
that some of what the interviewers say is scripted, especially when they are
presenting the audience with facts about Game of Thrones which can make the
data unreliable. However, it is extremely unlikely that the actors and
directors who are also speaking in the clips use a script so their speech is
spontaneous so is reliable.
To avoid these issues in further investigations, I would skip
directly into the middle of each script and transcribe for two minutes from
there so that the conversation had become more developed and the register had
lowered so the speech was more natural making the data I recorded more reliable
to use in my investigation.
Using videos from YouTube avoids practical issues such as recording
live natural speech, which may make the conversation sound unnatural if they
are told their voices are being recorded.
If I were to record natural speech without informing the participants
this would face ethical issues, however with using YouTube videos as data I
avoid having to obtain permission to record speech.
However, using YouTube does have issues of its own such as the fact
that I do not own the videos or the data I record. I also have to transcribe
the speech in the videos and due to the amount of overlaps; it is hard to
understand what some speakers are saying. This may make the data unreliable if
I have written the wrong word or missed out a word. On the other hand, I am
able to replay the video as many times as I need to understand what the speaker
is saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment