An Idea For My Language Investigation

One idea that I have for a Language Investigation is based on an experiment that I read about in the book, "The Myth of Mars and Venus". The experiment done, by someone whose name escapes me, was in short, a focus into the Language & Gender of children by getting them in two small groups, one a boys group and one a girls. The researcher then provided each group with a stimulus which was a list of items that each group had to order in terms of necessity in order to survive on a desert island. The researcher wanted to find out whether the boys would be competitive about how to order the list and whether the girls would be much more understanding of each other and be more tentative in the discussion. The researcher’s results however were quite the opposite and the researcher also conducted interviews with the children and the teacher who was present to find out why the girls were so argumentative and why the boys were quite co-operative. I would like to re-create this experiment in order to find out whether this was just an anomalous incident or whether our beliefs of gendered conversation are wrong and that the previous evidence is proof that genders do not follow stereotypes in language. I would also like to conduct to a questionnaire in order to find out what people think the evidence that I will collect and look at their answers in comparison to the data I’ve collected. I would like to do an investigation into Deborah Tannen’s Difference Pairing in Gendered Conversation and I hope my proposed research will shed some light onto this topic.