...18, 2024 Running Through Pages While often overlooked, discourse communities play an influential role in how people write and communicate with one another. A discourse community is defined as a group of people who share a set of basic values and beliefs. These individuals find themselves amongst one another, working together towards a common goal. As Seeley, Xu and Chen stated, discourse communities are defined by a set of standards, including: “a broadly agreed upon set of goals, ways of communicating within the group, member participation that provides information, feedback, and initiates action, and a core group of experienced members” (Seeley, 3). Discourse communities play a huge...
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...The term was first coined by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan in (1966) and widely expanded from 1996 to today by Finnish-born, US-based applied linguist Ulla Connor, among others. Since its inception the area of study has had a significant impact on the teaching of writing in both English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classes, bringing attention to cultural and linguistic differences in the writing of English L2 students. This attention to writing was especially welcomed in the area of ESL instruction, as an emphasis on spoken-language skills had previously dominated ESL contexts in the United...
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...are many people who belong to more than one discourse community. Discourse communities are groups of people that use communication to achieve certain goals or purposes. A purpose, genre, vocabulary, convention, membership and an audience are essential for writing professionally in any discourse community. Every community is different from each other as well as essential for writing. The language or vocabulary that we use in a discourse community differs from others and that’s because every community has a different way to communicate. Every single individual on Earth belongs to at least one discourse community. The most important community for many people including myself would have to be the Family discourse community. Family discourse communities are very different from each other as their vocabulary, language and many other things vary. Family discourse communities are very exclusive and in order to be part of one you must be born, married or adopted into this community. There are two ways to communicate within this community, the first one is formal Spanish and English and the second one is informal Spanish and English. Formal vocabulary is used with the elders such as grandparents and informal vocabulary is used with your cousins, parents and uncles. The conversations within...
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...‘Discourse’ is a complicated concept that has developed numerous discourse analytical theories. Discourses are abundant throughout society. Society itself is built upon discourses. Two differing discourses social, and cultural discourses are used to discuss the differences between Twitter and Facebook in the use of branding. Depicting the “social discourse” is “Twitter vs Facebook: Which is more valuable for brands?” an article by Megan O’Neill. The opposing discourse of “culture” is portrayed through “Social Networking: Twitter vs Facebook,” a blog post by Jessica Kim. Firstly, it should be notable that there is no utter definition of discourse. The study of discourse is a vast field, and the nature of its complexity stands as enough of an explanation. On that note, this essay will attempt to define discourse in the way it has been understood. Discourse could be defined as any given theme derived from any given body of text. According to Michel Foucault (1997), discourses are “socially constructed knowledge’s of some aspect of reality” (Theo p.94). Discourses provide us with a port of reference and a way to interpret the world, allowing our knowledge to be influenced and created through certain discourses. Specific notions on a chosen topic have been constructed according to our social contexts; our knowledge of a particular object and are influenced and created through discourses. (Theo p.94) In the Foucauldian conception, Discourse is seen as “more than just a way...
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...87 .,~. Peer Tutoring and the "Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth A. Bruffee The beginnings of peer tutoring lie in practice, not in theory. A decade or so ago, faculty and administrators in a few institutions around the country became aware that, increasingly, students entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their abilities suggested they should be able to do. Some of these students were in many ways poorly prepared academically. Many more of them, however, had on paper excellent secondary preparation. The common denominator among the poorly prepared and the apparently well prepared seemed to be that, for cultural reasons we may not yet fully under stand, all these students had difficulty adapting to the traditional or "normal" conventions of the college classroom. One symptom of the difficulty was that many of these students refuSed .help when it was offered. Mainly, colleges offered ancillary programs staffed by professionals. Students avoided them in droves. Many solutions to this problem were suggested and tried, from mandated programs to sink-or-swim. One idea that seemed at the time among the most exotic and unlikely (that is, in the jargon of the Sixties, among the most "radical") turned out to work rather well. Some of us had guessed that students were refusing the help we were providing because it seemed to them merely an extension of the work, the expectations, and above all the social structure of traditional classroom learning. And...
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...2018 Dr. Gail York ASU English Department Boone, NC 28608 Dear Dr. York, The discourse communities that I chose to focus on in my paper were my involvement in Appalachian State’s Student Government Association (SGA) and my membership in Appalachian State’s Honors College. One of my main successes writing this paper was deciding on the two best discourse communities to use. SGA and the Honors College proved to be obvious choices due to amount of time I spend attending meetings for SGA and studying to stay in good academic standing with the Honors College. Another one of the successes that I had while writing this paper was reflecting on the “so what” component of my literacy in my discourse communities....
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...An Doan Ms. Valtinson ENGL 1113-08 May 1, 2015 Individuality through Transferability Writing is something that everyone does. Whether one likes it or not, they end up using their words. People tend to write about subjects that interest or relate to them. Everyone has their own way of writing, but their way was influenced by another source whether they know it or not. Individuality in writing is influenced through transferability. Technical writing is something that is learned. In school everyone was taught how to format an essay or different types of writing like poems or stories. Anything that I did in class I was always given a template of how the instructor wanted the paper to be written. This would have word count, the format, and what the paper should be about. All throughout school we learned the fundamentals of writing starting with letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, to structures of writing like essays and poems. The thing that is learned from writing is technical. As my English education grows the technical side is less focused on while the content is the most important thing. Content is the writing that I am doing now. The content portion of writing is not learned but influenced by others. My writing becomes influenced through examples like essays. In this English class, I believe that that’s how these three previous essays worked out. The Scholarly Discourse Unit paper was a paper that had us synthesize how we thought the writers Gee, Swales, and Porter...
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...Bernstein, Susan Naomi. “Writing and White Privilege: Beyond Basic Skills.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 4.1 (2004): 128-31. Evaluating the relationship between white, middle-class privilege and both standardized testing and standard conventions of writing, Bernstein offers a classroom strategy for underprivileged students (either from racial or class position or both) to counter the negative effects of academic standards in relegating them to remedial positions in order to acquire basic writing skills before being granted access to the university at large. Encouraging her students to explore their previous educational experiences related to both testing and writing through a workshop format, as well as to evaluate their own imaginative writing and the reading of creative texts, Bernstein found that these can be used as means of critical resistance to their remedial designations. Ultimately, though, she concludes that it is not the student’s responsibility alone to resist relegation but also educators as well, who need to address and seek to resolve the conditions that produce “basic writers” even before their arrival at the university, and this, according to the author, will produce an awareness and restructuring of white privilege in determining academic success. Campbell, Kermit E. “ ‘Real Niggaz’s Don’t Die’: African American Students Speaking Themselves into Their Writing.” Writing in Multicultural Settings...
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...I believe that my discourse community helped with picking a topic before writing and researching for this annotated bibliography. My previous education never prepared me for writing an annotated bibliography. However, I feel my professor made this process very difficult and unrealistic in developing writing skills for this assignment. I thought some assignments were a bit pointless, they required a lot on my part to stay focus with the course lessons or withdrawal from the class. After applying the rules of a discourse community help me to identify my topic’s discourse community for my research, I felt stronger towards my opinion because the topic was interesting and related to my career field. However, I learned the importance strategies for...
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...Now when reading thru the “Concept of a discourse community “ I found it a very difficult piece to write about. Really just reading thru it I found myself having to go back over it many times. So for this paper we were soppose to analize a part of the writing. So I decided to go over thse 6 chartestics that swalles talked about. Like I said swales came up with a set of guidelines that a discourse community has to meet to be actulla considered as a discourse community. The six characteristics that are to be included in a discourse community are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genre’s, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise (Swales, John. "The Concept of Discourse Community." (1990): 119-28. Print.)....
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...Preface/Unit Reflection I had many thoughts about my audience and the format of this essay before I started, but as I haven’t done essays in a long time (business majors usually focus on projects, not essays), I decided that I wanted to write my first project in a straightforward fashion. I feel that I need to get the rust off my writing, so to speak I chose to write to the rest of the class because 1) They will be peer reviewing it, so it’s convenient for them that they are the target audience and 2) I could express my thoughts in a straightforward fashion that my audience can relate to very well, as they are in the same position as I am. I wrote this essay as if I was writing to an intellectual friend who is also taking this class, is very interested in English and entrepreneurship, and wanted to see how the two topics coincided through the lens of genre analysis. I assumed that the reader knew the definitions of materiality, genre and genre analysis, and discourse community, as the intended reader is in this class and has done the readings. Surprisingly, I learned a lot about my field through reading and writing for this unit. I really loved the challenging readings, as it seemed as if I were “getting smarter” reading them. Pushing my brain processing abilities is great for my brain’s capabilities, which I value. As I wrote, I would constantly think of new ideas about my field, such as the materiality of online articles in an entrepreneur’s life, and think hard. I appreciate...
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...the L2 discourse? Does the classroom allow her to? What purpose does self-definition serve? In several studies I found, students did not feel that they identified with the target language, and those who did fell in and out of favor with the target language as they struggled to figure out their position between discourse communities. This type of struggle and lack of clearly measurable improvement is frequently viewed as a classroom failure. For example, as we have discussed in class, interpretations of a text that deviate from the “authoritative” interpretation are considered failed attempts even though reader response theory sustains that students read texts against their L1-mediated life experiences. It would seem that some sort of conflict between what is expected and what the learner brings to the table is a site for learning. Therefore, teacher emphasis on language as a tool to mediate an “identity crisis” may actually discourage students from identifying with the target language. The teacher is in danger of providing an “identity solution” of accommodation or acculturation (Lu 1992). Since to some extent the goal of reading and writing classrooms is have students actively redefine their identity position both as a learner and as a person in the world through critical reading, teachers must be wary of prescribing L2 identity categories for students in the process. Borrowing from Lu (1992), perhaps a way forward is to view conflict as the new status quo, where writing is a sort...
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...CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the Study "Language and Media" is a comprehensive introduction to how language interacts with media. It investigates the forms of language found in media discourse; how patterns in such language use contribute to recognizable media genres and styles; and, broader social themes and consequences that arise from media language. It uses a wide variety of real texts from the media specifically from Magazines. Boles (2012) believes that each magazine uses linguistic techniques these language features are creatively used in magazines by the writers to attract and entertain the target audience as they only have a small space and time to get the attention of the potential buyer of the product. Bell (2010) emphasizes the importance of the processes which produce media language, as stories are molded and modified by various hands. He stresses it is indeed stories that journalists and editors produce, not articles. These stories have viewpoint, values and structure that can be analyzed. He is concerned, too, with the role of the audience in influencing media language styles, and in understanding, forgetting or misconceiving the news presented to it. A feature story is a special human interest story article that is not closely tied to a recent news event. It focuses on particular people, places, and events, and it goes into great detail regarding concepts and ideas of specific market interest. The study primarily aims to provide...
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...Writing with authority is another way of saying writing with craft. More than anything, authority also refers to believability. In order to create believability, authority requires acknowledgement on concerning the reader. For some people, writing in their profession is a blessing for them, while others may see it as a curse. Not knowing how to accurately write in sociology can define one’s credibility as a professional writer. Therefore, just because some knows how to properly write in APA formatting doesn’t define the paper to be well written. In order to write a well written paper and mastering your research papers, the writer should learn how to write with authority. This could mean changing your writing styles, the tone of your writing...
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...When beginning Higher Education, students at University face some unique clashes. According to Bizzell (1986) those three clashes are Clashes of Dialect, Clashes of Discourse and Clashes of worldwide views. For new students who have never encountered University life before, it is said to be a completely different environment, one which can be very intimidating. Students find themselves out of their comfort zone and facing new challenges which can be very overwhelming. Angela Thomas-Jones (2012) stated “beginning your own studies at university requires a culture adjustment in order to succeed. It is a new culture that needs to be given time to adapt to. Becoming familiar with the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values and practices of the university culture is the key to successful acculturation”. Some of the reasons why these clashes may have meaning to many students is due to the pressure individual students put on themselves to achieve good grades, be successful and be accepted amongst peers. Throughout my essay I will discuss in detail each of the three clashes outlined by Bizzell (1986). The first clash mentioned by Bizzell (1986) was the Clash of Dialect. This refers to the language being used by students within the university community. The basic writers are those students who experience the greatest distance between their home dialects and Standard English, the preferred dialect in school (Bizzell 1986). The dialect within university is something that students need to adapt...
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