The role of gender in conversational dominance: A study of EFL learners

Abstract

Gender differences have always been controversial in pragmatics. This article reports on a study that examined the role of gender in the quality of conversational dominance in informal conversation by focusing on Persian EFL learners. To this end, both quantitative and qualitative conversational data from 10 Iranian dyads were analyzed. In this study, conversational dominance is defined as one speaker’s tendency to control the other speaker’s conversational actions over the course of an interaction. Since the norms of speaking are strongly affected by gender, both male and female Iranian learners are constrained to gender-specific modes of interaction. The findings of this study revealed that women show greater acceptance in conversation and due to this feature they try to have more facilitative role in conversation, and men try to maintain dominance over topic by showing more assertive mode during stages of topic development and maintenance. Men by using different strategies like interrupting women, topic shifting, asking questions and raising topics, criticizing and engaging in conflict, and silence try to keep dominance over the conversation. Furthermore, men by being more self-oriented and women by being more other-oriented show varying degrees of dominance over the conversation. The implications of our findings for the use of dominance strategies to take the field of conversation in the EFL context are discussed.