Description

The purpose of this assignment, in part should help you:
 Better understand how language practices mediate group activities
 Gain tools for examining discourses and texts of various communities and for conducting ethnographic research of your own.
 Synthesize source material
 Understand writing and research as a process
 Improve as a reader of complex, research-based texts
Getting Started
Discourses are group members’ shared “ways of being in the world” (Gee 484). When a group of people shares goals or purposes and uses communication to achieve them, we can call that group a discourse community (Swales 471). To compose your Discourse Community analysis, you will draw upon questions offered from the texts we have read for this unit:
 Spend a few hours hanging out with or near a discourse community of your own choice—dorm, store, gaming community, and so forth. Write down every use of specialized use of language that you hear—whether it is an unusual word or phrase, or simply an unusual use of a fairly common word or phrase. And note when a term you were familiar with was being used with a new meaning or in a new way.
 Gee notes that there are different conflicts and tensions between Discourses. Consider different Discourses you belong to that have different values, beliefs, attitudes, language use, and so on. How do you navigate between or among these discourses?
 Drawing on Wardle and Johns, conduct a brief analysis of U.S. Presidential rhetoric in order to consider how presidents use language to convey authority. Determine how they convey authority through words, phrases, tone, and delivery.
Data Collection
 Observe members of the discourse community while they are engaged in a shared activity; take detailed notes;
o What are they doing? What kinds of things do they say? How do you know who is “in” and who is “out”?
 Collect anything people in that community read or write (their genres)—even very short things like forms, sketches, notes, IMs, and text messages;
 Interview at least one member of the discourse community. Record and transcribe the interview by conducting the interview through e-mail. You might ask things like, “How long have you been here? Why are you involved? What do X, Y, and Z words mean? How do you learn to write A, B, or C?
Data Analysis
First, try analyzing the data you collect using the six characteristics of Swale’s discourse community.
 What are the shared goals of the community? Why does this group exist? What does it do?
 What mechanisms do members use to communicate with each other (meetings, phone calls, e-mails, text messages, newsletters, reports, evaluation forms, etc.)?
 What are the purposes of each of these mechanisms of communication (to improve performance, make money, grow better roses, share research, etc.)?
 Which of the above mechanisms of communication can be considered genres (textual responses to recurring situations that all group members recognize and understand)?
 What kind of specialized language (lexis) do group members use in their conversation and in their genres? Name some examples—ESL, on the fly, 86, etc. What communicative function does this lexis serve (e.g., why say “86” instead “we are out of this”)?
 Who are the “old timers” with expertise? Who are the newcomers with less expertise? How do newcomers learn the appropriate language, genres, knowledge of the group?
The above will give you an overall picture of the discourse community. Now you want to focus on what you’ve learned to find something that is especially interesting, confusing, or illuminating. You can use Swales and Wardle to assist you in this. In trying to determine what to focus on, you might ask yourself questions such as:
 Are there conflicts within the community? If so, what are they? Why do the conflicts occur? Do texts mediate these conflicts and make them worse in some way?
 Do any of the genres help the community work toward its goals especially effectively—or keep the community from working toward its goals? Why?
 Who has authority here? How is that authority demonstrated in written and oral language?
 Where does that authority come from?
 Are members of this community stereotyped in any way in regard to their literacy knowledge? If so, why?
Planning and Drafting
As you develop answers to some of these questions, start setting some priorities. Given all you have learned above:
 What do you went focus on in your paper?
 Is there something interesting regarding goals of the community?
 Conflicts in the community?
 Lexis and mediating genres?
 Verbal and written evidence of authority/enculturation in the community?
At this point you should stop and write a refined research question for yourself that you want to address in your paper. Now that you have observed and analyzed data, what questions would you like to explore in your paper?
In a research assignment, your paper ought to have the following parts, or make the following moves (unless there’s a good reason not to):
 Begin with a very brief review of the existing literature on the topic: “We know X about discourse communities” (cite Swales, Johns, and Gee as appropriate).
 Name a niche (“But we don’t know Y” or “No one has looked at X”)
 Explain how you will occupy the niche.
 Describe your research methods.
 Discuss your findings in detail (Use sources as examples in how to do this—quote from your notes, your interview, the texts you collected, etc)
 Include a works cited page.
What Makes It Good?
Your assignment will be most successful if you’ve collected and analyzed data and explored the way that texts mediate activities within a particular discourse community. The assignment asks you to show a clear understanding of what discourse communities are and to demonstrate your ability to analyze them carefully and thoughtfully. It also asks that you not simply list the features of your discourse community but also explore in some depth a particularly interesting aspect of that community. Since this assignment asks you to practice making the moves common to academic research articles, it should be organized, readable, fluent, and well edited text of 1500 words following MLA documentation guidelines including a works cited page and an interesting title.

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