Gender, storytelling, and language choices with Spanish-English bilingual couples

Date

2015-08

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Abstract

This dissertation examines the storytelling practices and language choices of Spanish-English bilingual married couples in the United States using conversation analysis. Previous research has concluded that men and women have different storytelling practices, but this dissertation is the first known study that investigates these differences using conversation analysis with Spanish-English bilingual couples. Thirty participants (15 males and 15 females) constituting 15 married couples provided data for the study through background questionnaires, recorded conversations, and recorded interviews.

In terms of storytelling practices, the data analysis confirms the finding of previous research that men tell more first stories while women tell more second stories. A turn-by-turn analysis of the pre-launching turns suggests that this is the result of cross-gender collaboration. Also, both genders use the same universal sequential narrative structure, but gender seems to influence how the first and second stories are told and how they function in the conversational context. Men’s and women’s stories differ in terms of tone, emphasis of personal performance, inclusion of personal feelings and negative details, and the placement of self vs. other people, and the conversational data suggest that men’s stories tend to emphasize meeting the referential function while women’s stories focus on the evaluative function of narratives. In spite of these differences, both genders employ collaborative efforts during the telling of and responding to the second narrative, and no gender is found to use more continuers or questions. In sum, the study shows that bilingual couples’ storytelling serves as a venue for both cross-gender collaboration and gendered self-expression.

In terms of couples’ language choices, the data suggest that bilingual couples have an accurate perception of their language practices; that is, their perception corresponds closely to their actual use of English and Spanish as evaluated by the recorded conversations and interviews. In addition, the couples display a thorough understanding of how and why they make their current language decisions. The analysis of the interview data uncovers seven main factors that the couples identify as the primary determinants of their language choices: place/setting, children, proficiency, the need for an emotion code, the need for a secret code, initial contact, and conversational topic. The language choices influenced by these factors allow couples to negotiate their place in a larger culture, influence the future of U.S. bilingualism, build couple intimacy, establish and negotiate couple identity, and maintain a couple culture through shared linguistic and cultural habits.

While this study, like all others, is limited by the participants, the tasks, and the methodology employed, it suggests that gender has a role to play in couples’ storytelling practices. In addition, it uncovers couple conversations as local venues in which individualized, gendered patterns of language use are negotiated and maintained and in which couples collaborate and minimize gender differences as they form shared habits and identities. It also suggests that bilingual couples exhibit a detailed understanding of how and why they make language choices. The present study further supports the sociolinguistic value of data-driven research based on conversation analysis for studying gender and storytelling with bilingual couples.


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Keywords

Language, Gender, Bilingualism, Conversation Analysis, Storytelling, Language Choices, Couples, English, Spanish Language

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