Occupation-Opinion article-26/04/16

Work or Life?

with millions of people working around the world, is it still a job or is it slowly taking over?

The big question is do you own your job or is your job owning you? With jobs come discourse communities which means others within your occupation share lexis, rules and methods of communication that are individually suited to the occupation. These methods of communication are fine when used in the work place but the inclusion of them in daily life seems to give off the impression that your job is taking over and i think these should be left totally separate.

As a person whose occupation is a primary school teacher i often find myself using the same type of language in my every day life whether its communicating with my friends or children.  This comes with two disadvantages. The first being i can come across as patronizing to my friends which i totally understand. The tone i use in different situations would bug me honestly and i need to realize talking to Billy in Key stage two (KS2) when hes getting upset because he answered a question wrong is a totally different situation to when my friends are going through a hard time. The second disadvantage is when I speak with same tone to my children. Although they are now at similar ages to who i work with everyday at the moment they will grow up soon and then what do i do? I obviously can not treat them like children all their life.

Respected theorist John Swales 

Gender speech-12/04/16

Speech plan- 
Deficit model
Difference model
Dominance model
Include theories- Mary beards ideas about women's voices not being valued.
Audience- sixth form students-Is it the way women are speaking or is it how they are treated when they are speaking? include dominance model and other theories that support these questions.


Today I am going to do a speech expressing my views on women's language and how i strongly believe their is no distinct difference between men and women's language and why it infuriates me when it comes to inequality because of how people speak.
A lot of women are treated differently because of the way they use speech supposedly... but i think the reason for the inequality is because the way they are treated when they are speaking rather than how they actually speak. Zimmerman and Wests dominance model is the main theory that will support and explain my strong point of view. Incase you are not already aware of the dominance model this was a theory and investigation that was taken to see patterns and ways in which both genders talked during conversation with each other. The investigation found that 96% of interruptions during a mixed gender conversation came from men. These findings lead me to believe that how can people say women speech is less valid than men when they are not being allowed to speak anyway.
Another subject which also points towards inequality within genders is the titles changing at different times and for different reasons depending on what gender you are. When a male is a boy he is given the title of 'master' and when the women is considered a girl they are given the title of 'miss'. The issue starts at the point that boys will change to 'Mr' when considered an adult but on the other hand women stay as 'miss' until married. What this indicates to me is that supposedly women have to rely on men to change their title which i think is outrageous. I feel because of this it makes old stereotypes that men have ownership of 'their' women and can dictate not only what they do but can even control the name they come under which should not be the case and women should become 'Mrs' or 'Ms' when thought to be an adult.
Not only do i think that the titles of the different genders changing at different times is wrong  but i also think the the title in itself is down grading. 'Mrs' can be seen as just an add on from 'Mr' which could indicate that a woman is an add on from the man. This shows that the woman is not actually unique at all when it should 100% be different.
Thank you for listening.