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Jennifer Coates
BornNovember 13, 1942 (age 76)
NationalityBritish
Occupation(s)Author and Linguist
Organisation(s)Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton, United Kingdom
Known forLanguage, Gender and Sexuality

Turn-taking in conversation

Conversational narrative
Notable workWomen in their speech communities (1989)

Women, Men and Language: A sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language (1993)

Women Talk: Conversation between women friends (1996)

Women's Studies: An Introduction (1996)

Men Talk: Stories in the making of Masculinities (2003)
Opponent(s)Deborah Tannen, Robin Lakoff, Jennifer Cheshire,Lesley Milroy

Jennifer Coates (born November 13, 1942)[1] is an English Author and linguist and is currently situated at the University of Roehampton in London as an Emeritus Professor of English language and Linguistics.[2] Since being established at Roehampton, she has provided her own interests and feminist attitudes by becoming Chair Person of the Working Party and has set up Women's Studies as an academic field for Undergraduates at Roehampton Institute. She further contributed by offering two options to the Women's Studies course on the Undergraduate Programme. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and of Language and Discourse, as well as being a member of the editorial board of the John Benjamin's series ‘Studies in Narrative’.[3]

Other than her efforts in education, Coates is internationally known for her work in the field of Language and gender and Conversational Narrative, her most famous work being her book Women, Men and Language (2nd edition 1993).[4] In her 37 years of vocation, Jennifer Coates has published 22 books, mostly focusing on analysing female and male language and conversation. Her first book published was in 1983 called The semantics of the modal auxiliaries which is a report she explored investigating the meanings of the modal auxiliaries in Modern British English.[5]

Coates describes herself as as an ethnographer of communication, more precisely as an feminist ethnographer as opposed to a dispassionate investigator who studies 'scientific' aspect of language.[6]


Life

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Jennifer Coates was born on November 13 in 1942 and is currently 76 years old.[7] She was once married and lived in Oxton, Merseyside, a village in the suburbs of Birkenhead in the UK with her husband and three children; Simon, Emily and William.[8] Before living in Oxton however, she was previously situated in Ormskirk, Lancashire where Coates teached a Language and gender undergraduate course at Edge Hill University. She had always been interested in language and linguistics, especially in the field of language associated with gender but it wasn't until 1883, when her marriage ended that she acted on her passions and decided she needed an outlet that was dedicated to her own work and achievements. Her career was just about to blossom as she decided to look for a full-time university post in Linguistics. Whilst looking for a permanent job, Coates focused on her own projects, actively working on manuscripts and her own linguistic investigations. One of her most famous books, Women Talks was sparked by her adjure in focusing more on friendships with women, since throughout her marriage she did not acknowledge this support. Only a year after her divorce, Coates was offered a lecturing post in London at Roehampton University in which decided to take. She moved away from Birkenhead and away from her friends The Oxton 'Ladies' and started the position in September 1984.[9] When she moved and became a lecturer at Roehampton, she met and started working with linguist Deborah Tannen and together they taught the English language component of the Undergraduate English Degree at Roehampton. When Jennifer Coates met Deborah Tannen, an instant friendship had begun as they both realised they had strong common interests in their linguistic field and were both interested in the status quo of Language and gender.[10]

The Oxton 'Ladies'

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One of Jennifer Coates' main and most known interests of research within her linguistic field is specifically women communication and female one on one talk. What sparked her interests in this field were the conversations and friendships she had with her own women friends. Over several years, since 1975 Coates and her friends would host gatherings in the evenings once a fortnight at each other's houses to sit around, eat, drink and generally just chat like friends do. Coates called her and her group of friends The Oxton 'Ladies since Oxton was the village in which they lived in and had these gatherings in.[11] These gatherings were Jennifer Coates' spark of inspiration and was the significant beginning of her book 'Women Talk' in which she recorded the conversations being had at these gatherings as material and evidence for her manuscript. This interest of hers stemmed from focusing more of her time on friendships with women after her marriage had broken since, throughout being with her husband, she did not have a lot of support from women friends at the time.[12]

Linguistic theory

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All works and research devised by Jennifer Coates is associated around the field of Language and gender. One of Coates' main research projects focuses on all-female conversation in which she builds on Deborah Tannen's ideas associated with conversational styles, features and assumptions surrounded with women interaction. She emphasised strands of research regarding language and gender in an effort to demonstrate how the field developed. Coates also has looked into the ideas associated around the question 'Do men and women talk differently?'.[13] In her book Women, Men and Language published in 1993, Coates collects evidence to explore this claim, coming to conclusions on how and in what ways men and women's conversation and interactions differ. Coates’ central argument is that ‘gender plays a significant role in the construction of the linguistic landscape of our everyday lives’.[14]

Women Talk

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Over ten years of Jennifer Coates' life was dedicated to producing her book Women Talk which was eventually published in 1996. The book explores conversations between women friends and reveals certain aspects of language that women use between each other as opposed to mixed gender conversations. Coates' ideas throughout contradict pre-existing myths about 'Women's Talk' being trivial and unimportant, bringing to light how language plays a crucial part in building and maintaining women friendships.

Coates' initial research to build her investigation was taken from her own life. She taped a series of recordings from social gatherings she hosted with her friends known as The Oxton 'Ladies'. Four tapes were recorded at her own house with the initial group consisting of five women, at the time unaware themselves that their conversations were being documented for Coates' research project.[15] Coates finally started transcribing these tapes two summer vacations after her departure from Oxton [16], Birkenhead in 1984 and it was during this time that Coates became convinced that single sex talk among women and girls was what she wanted to work on which led her to gather more research.

Her research period was between 1984 and 1993 and throughout that time her research consisted of:

  • recordings from her own friends - four recordings
  • recordings of women and girls Coates knew when they were with their friends
  • recordings of women who volunteered to record themselves with their friends
  • recordings of Coates, asking for conversational data and recordings of women friends from linguists

Coates collected 20 conversations from these strategies, a total of 19 hours and 30 minutes of recorded talk between women friends.[17]

Jennifer Coates describes women talk as 'jam sessions'. That conversation between women is a 'spontaneous and improvisatory performance of talk, for their own enjoyment'. She provides evidence that women use language to mirror, balance and echo each other when in converse and that the construction of talk is a joint effort and all chip in to the construction of talk.[18]

Feminist Ethnography

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Coates is defined as 'a women researcher' as she frequently chooses to work with women in her research and avoids the arrogance of malestream work. Jennifer Coates does not just describe herself as a ethnographer, but as a feminist ethnographer. This means that she puts women as the centre of her work and does not pretend to be 'Objective' by acknowledging where she is coming from at the start of her work and that truth is discovered. She is a researcher that is necessarily partial and that her research is Subjective and political. Coates argues that her being engaged and interested in her work is a strength as opposed to a weakness. Coates is sensitive to the potential for exploitation in the relationship between the researcher and the researched and challenges methodologies who treat the females being researched as objects.

In her own research she states that she "wants to portray women as social actors, as agents in our own lives, not as victims." Therefore, Coates defines and makes clear in her own work, her relationship with the women who participates in her research and aims to not make that part of the research invisible, encouraging mutual respect between researcher and research subjects. Coates wouldn't have been able to collect as much data as she did if it wasn't for the considerable amount of women that had helped her throughout the investigation process. One of the reasons why Coates decided to focus her work considerably on women is that she felt most comfortable working with women and with friends and that, because she knew most of the females she worked with, this insider status meant that she could bring a wider understanding into her data.

Through her writing and research in her book Women Talk, Jennifer Coates conveys an attitude that celebrates women's everyday lives and opposes the routine trivialisation of what women do, to shows her readers that women have powerful voices and that women's everyday experiences are validated.[19] She draws on radical cultural feminist principles when investigating in women's friendship groups. Coates states in the end of her book: "It is the radical potential of women's friendships that makes them worthy of close investigation. They can be seen as a model of the way relationships should be, of the way relationships might be in the future"[20] Coates work contributes to female equality as she creates a tone that celebrates women and their voices. Her work echoes the previous works of Janet Holmes who conveys positive assessments of women's special interactional abilities and who's work also provides an alternative way of portraying a feminist attitude and shows more pessimistic view of women’s interactional practices found in Liberal feminism.[21]


"Knowledge generated through engagement offers greater insight...than that generated through attachment." - One claim from feminist scholarship that Coates greatly looks up to. [22]

Difference approach

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Jennifer Coates contrasts the four approaches known as deficit, dominance, difference and dynamic. However she believes that 'dynamic' or as Coates calls it 'social constructionist' approach is the most current approach to her field of study, Language and gender.[23]Coates's aim is not merely to establish that women and men do indeed speak differently, but to provide evidence of how and why this happens. In doing so, she draws on folk linguistic, grammarian, anthropologic, and dialectological material, as well as a number of quantitative studies that concentrate on examples from English speaking communities.


Coates investigates into some linguistic variables that have been studied by former linguists to approach and define how men and women's language differ in everyday conversation. There are three approaches when it comes to defining men and women's language in the linguistic world these being, dominance theory, difference theory and deficit theory. She states within her research that certain language techniques, such as keeping a conversation going, aren’t signs of inferiority or insecurity – that they actually show intelligence and perhaps power.[24] Coates found patterns in her research. She discovered that both boys and girls develop different speaking styles due to their interactions in all girl and all boy groups and that friendship groups are mostly all of the same gender. Through these same sex groups, Coates identified that "gender is the main principle with girls being encouraged to be typical ‘girls’ and boys' being encouraged to be typical ‘boys’."[25]" Coates main division when analysing men and women's speech is through the use of analysing boys and girls. Her research (and more work by Deborah Cameron) shows that boys and girls tend to talk about similar topics in single gender groups.

Coates' useful commentary

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A lot of Coates theory and assumptions are built on current linguists previous linguistic studies. Linguist, Deborah Jones' devised a theory in Women's speech and Coates expanded on this, formulating her own set of terms which identifies the four patterns Coates found when analysing real life Women to Women conversations and speech.[26]

The four categories:

  • House Talk – Coates' perception of distinguishing how conveying information and resources is connected with the role of a females occupation.
  • Scandal – a concept involved with judging the behaviour of women and their language that goes with it. Considered judging of the behaviour of others, and women in particular, intertwined with women's moral values with the home, also known as 'domestic morality'.
  • Bitching – Coates' way of identifying the way in which women express anger through language at their restricted role and inferior status. Usually expressed in private and to other women. The term 'to bitch' in language is women making complaints in an environment which they will be understood therefore is only done with other women; bitching will also not make change happen.
  • Chatting – Coates' states that this is the most intimate form of gossip that women converse in. Defined as being a 'mutual self-disclosure' and a form of speech that helps to nurture not only themselves but others and women use to their own advantage.[27]


Opportunities

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Before her teaching career at Roehampton University, Coates was given an opportunity to teach an option on the subject of Language and gender at Edge Hill University as part of an undergraduate linguistics course in 1976. This opportunity was given to her by English Professor, Dick Leith and since have collaborated together in many fields of linguistics. She was also the main speaker at From Scouse to Shakespeare conference situated at Edge Hill University which was on the 17th June 2004 in which she presented her view of gender and humour in everyday talk. The talk was aimed at both teachers and sixth form students at the college and focused on the interpersonal and textual functions of language.[28] It was this occasion that gave Coates the inspiration to continue teaching areas of linguistics in the subsequent years. Her book Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language was written because of these many years she taught at Edge Hill, her students and their dedication to her course stimulated her to produce work in this topic. [29]

Being an active feminist, during her time at Edge Hill she also was engaging in many feminist activities on Merseyside.

Since starting her professor teaching position at Roehampton in 1984, Coates had engaged in many collaborations and linguistically creative possibilities. In the latter of the year, Coates worked together with former linguist, Deborah Tannen in which they wrote a paper together called Some problems in the Sociolinguistic explanation of sex difference which was subsequently presented at the fifth Sociolinguistics Symposium at the University of Liverpool later that year. The investigation consisted on research into 11 articles focusing on Language and gender use in British settings and the analysis of linguistic features.[30] The paper then additionally went on to be published in Language and Communication, a journal dedicated to similar fields of study.

In August 1994, Coates was recognised for her linguistic studies and her teaching ability as she was awarded an Arts Faculty Visiting Fellowship at theUniversity of Melbourne , Australia in which she delivered a talk within her field of Language and gender. Her institution, Roehampton University granted her a year's study leave for this in which she was very grateful for. Coates then went on to spend 11 months based in the Linguistics department at Melbourne University, an environment that benefited her a lot as here she begin to write her book, Women Talk.[31] Jennifer Coates received many research grants when in the process of writing many of her books; especially from the Research committee and the English department at Roehampton University.[32]

References

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  1. ^ "Jennifer Coates"
  2. ^ "Academia:Jennifer Coates"
  3. ^ "Subculture and Conversational Style"
  4. ^ "Women's Talk: About the author"
  5. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1983). The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. Great Britain: Routledge. ISBN 978-1138989986.
  6. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2013). Women, Men and Everyday Talk. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-137-31494-9.
  7. ^ "Jennifer Coates"
  8. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. 1. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.
  9. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,UK: Blackwell Publishers. p. 5. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  10. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2013). Women, Men and Everyday Talk. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-137-31494-9.
  11. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 3. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  12. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 2. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  13. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1993). Women, Men and Language, Second Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. 3. ISBN 9780582074927.
  14. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1993). Women, Men and Language, Second Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. 1. ISBN 9780582074927.
  15. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 5. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  16. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 6. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  17. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 9. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  18. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 117. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  19. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 14. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  20. ^ Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women Talk. Oxford,uk: Blackwell Publishers. p. 286. ISBN 0-631-18253-5.
  21. ^ "The Feminist Foundations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research"
  22. ^ Bell, Diane (2013). Daughters of the Dreaming. Great Britain: Spinifex Press. p. 285. ISBN 978-1876756154.
  23. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. 6. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.
  24. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. 3rd Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. vii. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.
  25. ^ "Subculture and Conversational Style"
  26. ^ "Language and Gender"
  27. ^ "Language and Gender"
  28. ^ "Language Play: A Talk by Professor Jennifer Coates
  29. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. 3rd Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. viii. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.
  30. ^ "Directions in Sociolinguistics"
  31. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. 3rd Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. vii. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.
  32. ^ Coates, Jennifer (2004). Women, Men and Language. 3rd Edition. Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited. p. vii. ISBN 0-582-77186-2.

Bibliography

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