What Writing Students Get From the Net: Using Synchronous Communication
to Develop Writerly Skills
Gendered Language Unit Preparation for Chat Classes
Students need to be prepared for online experiences. On one level, they
need to have a context for what they are being asked to do. This context
can be provided through readings related to their experience and discussion,
of the readings or/and of the experience in general. On another level,
students' anxieties about any completely new medium must be allayed through
exposure, practice and reassurance. The preparation for online meetings
related to this unit were weighted more toward readings and discussion
than experience; in the case of this assignment, overpreparation could
have skewed the results and hampered students' ability to test the theories
they were developing based on readings and discussion.
Readings (from Exploring Language. Gary Goshgarian, ed. Longman,
8th ed.)
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Cobb, Nathan. “Gender Wars in Cyberspace.” (1995)
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Nilsen, Alleen Pace. “Sexism in English: A 1990s Update.” (1994)
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Rosenthal, Jack. “Gender Benders.” (1986)
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Tannen, Deborah. “’I’ll Explain It to You’: Lecturing and Listening.” (1990)
Face-to-face Discussion
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Class one: Students wrote an in-class response to Tannen's article on a
word processor and printed it out.
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In between classes one and two: I took excerpts of those responses, cut-and-pasted
them into a handout, and noted for myself which ones were written by men/women.
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Class two: Students read the excerpts from the responses and tried to guess
which writers were male/female and why. We developed a list of characteristics
that seemed to indicate maleness/femaleness in language. We also discussed
to what extent these perceptions went along with what Tannen and Nilsen
argue.
Preparation for Online Classes
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Students were instructed to test their ability to access the chat room
24 hours before our scheduled chat and report any problems to me before
the class began.
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Students were emailed their "secret code names"
with instructions for logging on anonymously.