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Discourse Community

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There is a community called OU cousins which consists in helping international students being engaged in the United States and developing friendship. In order to deeply analyze this community as a discourse community, two interviews as well as observations were conducted. According to James Paul Gee’s definition of Discourse community, Gee is a researcher at Arizona State University who defines discourse community as being the different ways people integrate and combine language, interactions, actions, and ways people think, value, and believe (Gee, p.441), OU Cousins is considered as discourse community.
To begin, it is important to know specifically the purpose of the community and how this works. This program was created in 1996 by President …show more content…
According to their home web page, they annually have the matching party, which is a party at the beginning of the fall semester where interested people in the community find a partner to append some time together during the two semesters (“OU Cousins”). Also, they have the some other practices during a year such as watch a live thunder basketball game, barbecue and western party, traditional thanksgiving dinner, and “pumpkin carve and fall festival”, which is a party to celebrate the Halloween tradition; the party I went in October 27 in order to observe the way the community members interact, what they do, how they communicate, and also if any particular language is involved. According to Gee, one of the tools of inquiry is social languages and they are different styles or varieties of the same language used in different places among certain groups (Gee, p.440). Indeed, the way people use language to communicate varies in a way that the usage of one word may have different meaning for a certain group of people.
As example, the word “cousin” I just analyzed when people where introducing their partners to a friend during the pumpkin carve party. In the real context, or at least in the correct context, the word “cousin” is referred to a relative, or related someone’s family in one way; but they use this term to identify someone’s partner. However, through the observations I made, it is quite difficult to recognize any other variety of language rather than

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