The Use of Questions by Professors in Lectures Given in English: A Cross-gender Comparison

Abstract

In the last forty years, various striking differences in male and female communicative behaviors and language use have been documented in many sociolinguistic studies. However, in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), probably due to the common perception that academic conventional constraints and expectations ”force men and women to speak in a more similar fashion” (Schleef, 2008. p. 519) than in many other contexts, very few studies have examined gender effects on academic spoken discourse. Additionally, in the few related studies, conflicting results have been reported. Therefore, this study re-examines this gender issue by comparing male and female professors’ use of questions in their academic lectures. The corpus used in this study consists of 12 small-class lectures collected in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Four lectures (two from each gender group) 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 more gender similarities than differences. Most importantly, the findings suggest that the relationship between language and gender is not a straightforward one. Gender, disciplinary culture, and generic conventions of the lecture (as a well-established genre) seem to intertwine to influence the use of questions in academic lectures.