AN ANALYSIS OF INTERRUPTIONS IN MIXED AND SAME-SEX CONVERSATIONS AMONG ARGENTINE STUDENTS OF ENGLISH, A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Although  the interrelationship between gender  and interruptions has been deeply analysed,  it has  been  scarcely  studied  among  Argentinean  students   of English  as a  foreign language. Considering this fact, the present  paper  reports the results of an investigation  which examined whether  gender has any influence  on the amount of interrupting events committed by these students when involved in mixed and same sex dyadic conversations and to check whether the stereotype  "Men interrupt women  more  often than vice versa"  persists in this case study. A third  objective  was to identify  and analyse the types of interruptions  ('Supportive',  'Negative',

'Neutral') more frequently  used by men and by women. To fulfill such a purpose,  a corpus  of 24 videotaped dyadic conversations (12 mixed and 12 same sex) was collected. The  48 participants involved, 24 men and 24 women,  were being prepared to sit for the Cambridge  First Certificare examination   in  four  different  prívate  institutes   of  English   in  the  city  of  Concepción del Uruguay, Entre  Ríos province. The  results proved  that men interrupted men  and women  with almost the same frequency whereas women  produced almost twice as many interrupting events in mixed sex conversations than when interacting with a woman. The data collected in this study refuted  the stereotype  that "men interrupt women  more than vice versa" and confirmed that the majority of the interrupting events produced by the subjects were "Supportive".