Gender

Although stimulus material speakers represent different proficiency levels, they are all female between the ages of 19-28 years old. The most prominent comments regarding gender, however, are in reference to the native speaker dialog (Dialog 3); in this dialog, interlocutors’ ages range from 21-24 years old. Thus, it is not implausible to assume that both gender and age may play a role in the 24-year-old, female MA participant’s description of the interaction represented by this demographic as “what fluent English people can talk about”. Susan (a 67-

year-old, female MA participant) provides additional evidence that age as well as gender may be playing a role in such assessments. In the exchange below between Susan and Casey, Susan describes the dialog as “messy” and at first laughs, then calls out her 24-year-old colleague on her use of “like”.

62 FG 3, MA-Nov Participants, commenting on Dialog 3:

Casey: I feel like it’s a good example of, like, like this was something that you

Susan: @@@@

Casey: you could, what?

Susan: Do you know how many likes you used in the period of time

???: <several> @@@@

Casey: See? I could see this as being a good example of a fluent English

conversation. It’s between this demographic. Young, teenager, young little girls but it doesn’t really accomplish anything I would use in an English classroom. Personally. I-, I don’t think it would. It, like, I forgot what the topic was halfway through. I was, like, what are we talking about now? So, I .. I just would just be like .. here’s what fluent English people can talk about

Susan: I-, I wouldn’t even use it for that. It’s, it’s messy.

Casey: But it’s, it’s good, like I said, they sounded native-like.

Susan: M-hm.

Susan and Casey seem to be describing “girl talk”, a term adopted from a survey participant’s comment and used here to describe “very authentic interaction between young women”,

according to another survey participant. Dialog 3, the native speaker dialog, was the only dialog to elicit such comments from participants, suggesting that language produced by non-native female speakers – at least as represented by the dialog samples in this study – is not considered “girl talk.” Characterizations of “girl talk” correspond to those presented earlier for native speakers, which is perhaps unsurprising since both refer to the same group of speakers.

However, the descriptions included here for “girl talk” specifically refer to the speakers’ sex as a relevant factor; in this regard, “girl talk” may be viewed as a sub-genre of native speaker

“Girl talk” includes a high-pitched and fast prosody and “idiomatic use” of the discourse marker “like”. In addition, “girl talk” features “some other elements” that are not described, but likely refer to the more pronounced aspects described earlier in relation to Dialog 3 such as overlapping speech and laughter (“people cutting each other off, laughing, adding on to what the last person said”) or colloquial expressions such as “sucked in”, which generated several minutes of discussion during Focus Group 4. A participant in Focus Group 3 (excerpt 66) even visualizes “arms flying all over the place” accompanied by unspecified “facial expressions” as part of the communicative event.

63 Survey, MA-Nov (NS), commenting on Dialog 3:

Participant 26: Some people may not want to use this dialogue because the speaker used

"like" so much and spoke really quickly, but this is a very authentic interaction

between young women.

64 Survey, MA-Mid (NS), commenting on Dialog 3:

Participant 63: I believe this dialogue would present great difficulty to EFL students

below advanced level due to prosody, idiomatic use of "like", and some other

elements that would likely classify this as "girl talk" register of English usage. […]

65 FG 3, PhD and MA-Nov (NS & NNS), commenting on Dialog 3:

Caba: Yeah. And for this kind of audio, learners would definitely need a video to

understand what’s going on. ‘Cause the audio is not comprehensible.

Peter: M-hm. Yeah. You have to scaffold this with some other things.

Caba: Yeah. <quiet> So that they can..

Susan: I think it’s a great idea. Primarily because I just envision these two young

women with their arms flying all over the place

Caba: Yeah.

Susan: you’ll see their facial expressions .. that’s part the communication process

also

66 FG 3, PhD (NS), commenting on Dialog 3:

Peter: […] something I noticed when I was studying languages in the past, studying

Spanish, my preference for wanting to hear .. th-, what’s, you know, having

male professor or a female professor because the way, um, I would hear it. I could just hear a certain register or timber of tone of voice better than another one. So in terms of how I thought I would use this in a classroom, ..uh, the content or, or goal notwithstanding I’m not sure just st-, people will want to hear that sound. It-, it’s very, so, high-pitched. A

lot of laughing and giggling so I don’t think I would use it in a classroom

because, um, … i-, I-, in my mind I can’t find, like, a language goal that I would get out of it.

Evidence of the gender effect found in the quantitative data is also present in the survey comments and focus group data. For instance, a male focus group participant (excerpt 66) spends a considerable amount of time describing the prosodic qualities of the language in Dialog 3, then expresses uncertainty about using the dialog in a language classroom, stating: “I’m not sure just st-, people will want to hear that sound”.

In addition to a gender effect, a generational effect may also have played a role; at 46 years old, this male participant was almost twice the age of the dialog speakers, who ranged in age from 21 to 24 years old. Additional evidence of a generational effect may be found in the exchange between Susan and Casey (excerpt 62), both female MA students. While 24-year-old Casey describes the dialog as “fluent”, 67-year-old Susan counters by describing the dialog as “messy” and confronts Casey on her usage of “like.”