Summary of the Lecture

The topics in this lecture is about communication in general. To show the ways people in different genders and age groups communicate. In the first part of communication patterns, it introduced different patterns of communication, word order, grammar, the way we chose words or expressions and why we do chose them. Also, the analysis of natural conversations is to see if they can be presented to general public. Through a cross-cultural study shows the differences between men and women, youngs and olds on communication styles. Through the example of conversations between American and Japanese groups on how they start or end a conversation, how they present ,argue, or fignt, etc. we noticed that American style is quite straightforward often by ladies-first-style whereas Japanese is not in a direct way. They tend to start conversation by sequence of gender and age, and the don't use the same way talking to different kinds of people. For example, the ways of speaking to children and adult or elder people are quite different in their culture. From my point of view, compare with western people who are more direct in way of speaking, Asian people usually choose their words and expression, especially when asking for request or refuse somebody, they express indirectly.


In the part of conversational coherence, focusing on the physical arrangement in conversation of man- to- man and man -to -woman . it happens that men don't face each other when talking, but when a man talk with a woman, they usually look at each other face to face. Girls aged between 7 or 8 are comfortable and open freely to talk a topic, even in a story telling way, but boys aren't comfort under that situation, and they don't talk much in the topic. Boys and girls aged 12 or so are different, boys would have more topics to talk, we say according to research, 55topics within 20 minutes, such as sports,TV shows politics etc. When in trouble talking, boys tend to talk more about their own problems instead of listen to other's problems. But girls of this grade with more coherence, they agree with each other, and usually avoid saying 'I'm better that you' that kinds of thing. but to convey a feeling of 'I'm almost the same as you'.
In the TV debates part, they took 10 people involved in the TV debates for study, during the show, they noticed that people tend to listen to experts more than the one who are not, and they also listen to men more than women even men are not experts. Men present themselves and talking a lot in a lecture way to show themselves as experts.

In my opinion, men are more active in such situations, they tend to dominant the conversation and get control of it.