‘Teacher’s classroom teaching strategies should recognize that men and women use language differently’ is the title and also the point of Tennan writing this article to encourage teachers to adopt more diverse and perhaps more effective teaching methods. Tannen’s article was provoked by her analysis of women being a disadvantaged group in classroom settings as the environment encourages a greater amount of discussion time being dominated by men’s voices. Her evidence for the validity of the above point is that women in single-sex school do better in their later lives than women in mixed-school.
Tennan’s intended audiences for this article are teachers. In her article, she adopted an informal tone of sharing and constantly puts herself in the position of a teacher alongside her peers. This illustrates her empathy with other teachers and well understanding of the classroom scenario through her personal anecdotes and her personal interviews with her colleagues to provide confirmation of her claims.
Tennan’s article not only appeals to teachers who are receptive to new suggestions of classroom teaching strategies, her use of certain provoking statements seems to attempt to create a controversy and challenge all teachers to re-evaluate their classroom teaching methods. For instance, Tennan writes ‘This contrasts sharply with the way I teach’. In my opinion, the statement displays arrogance and superiority of her over her peers. A teacher who might be fully confident in his/her classroom teaching strategy might take offence in the above statement as it implies that Tennan’s teaching method is the only method that is right and effective and there is no alternatives. This may cause the disgruntled teacher to re-evaluate his/her classroom teaching strategies according to Tennan’s suggestions and also raise awareness of how men and women use language differently. Moreover what is there to lose if a simple trial of Tennan’s classroom teaching strategy can help discern the truth behind these compelling claims, they might think.
Tennan’s deliberate writing style in this article makes it an effective double edge sword to both share and provoke really impresses me. She concludes with ‘The goal of complete equal opportunity in class may not be attainable, but realizing that once monolithic classroom participation in not equal opportunity is itself a powerful motivation to find more-diverse methods to serve diverse students – and every classroom is diverse.’ exhibits her vision to encourage diversity and improve classroom teaching strategies. The extreme claims, personal anecdotes, and even being obnoxious in displaying only data that agrees with her claim are tools to raise awareness of how men and women use language differently and eventually provoke all teachers to think-out-of-the-box to explore classroom teaching strategies that address the flaws of current conservative ones.
After all, isn’t there a reason for how we know the existence of this article and why is it being chosen for critical analysis in class?
You're quite right that the article is very interesting in terms of the rhetorical strategies the writer uses, and you have discussed them well. I don't really agree, though, that Tannen comes across as arrogant by saying that she does not teach in the same way as she describes as typical. After all, she does not directly say the traditional way is "wrong" but only that teachers may be inadvertantly disadvantaging their female students by using it. All in all, I think she's pretty careful about not insulting her audience.
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