This project is a well-researched discussion of the discourse used by a particular community about a specific problem or issue. In this assignment, you will choose a topic of importance or interest to you.
Discourse Community Defined
All communication or discourse occurs between people within networks of participation or communities. Most people, on any given day, move between and within several discourse communities, whether among family, friends, school or workmates and in both online and face-to-face settings. The reading, writing, and visualizing we do are shaped by these discourse communities and, in turn, shape the social bonds that make up a community. Thus, closely examining the texts[1] produced within a discourse community can potentially shed light on the social relationships, tacit and explicit rules, and norms and values of that community.
Resources for this project (pdfs posted in Overview)
Johns, Ann M (1997). “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge UP, 51-70. Print. (WaW, pp. 498-518)
Porter, James E( 1986). “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Rhetoric Review. 5.1.
34-47. Print (WaW, pp. 86-96),
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print. (WaW, pp. 466-479)
Objective
For this assignment, you will analyze the way in which members of specific communities use specific communicative practices to become defined as a discourse community. First, you will choose a community, (keep this tailored to your discipline or field); it can be a discourse community to which you belong (co-op), but it does not have to be (you might consider a professional field you aspire to join), identify a particular problem or issue experienced by that community, then identify various forms of communication(discourse) that solidify the community’s identity as a discourse community.
i.e: Women University Faculty (Community) — Promotion Equity (Problem) – Blogs, Peer-Reviewed Articles, Facebook Groups, Documentaries, etc. (Forms of Communication or Communicative Practices) = An argument/justification about how this community ascribes to the tenets of a Discourse Community.
Think of this assignment in two phrases:
1) Research & Preparation
First, determine a specific problem or issue related to the professional community of your choosing (exigence). Then, conduct thorough research on various communicative practices within that community that addresses the issue in some way.
The sources of your research may be a mix of formal and informal discourse: published or not published, online or offline. They also do not necessarily need to be alphabetic-text heavy, in other words, visual texts are acceptable, depending on your choice of community. The analysis of these sources will help to answer the following questions, among others:
What are the dominant modes of communication—oral, written, visual—in this community?
What are the overarching norms for texts with regard to genre features?
Who has the authority to author texts in this community?
Pulling it all together: Audience and format for the final product
Your ultimate task is to assemble what you have learned from the document analysis into a coherent whole. Your analytical framework for this whole might draw from Swales’ “Concept of a Discourse Community”; John’s notions of “communities of practice”; or some combination of these theoretical approaches.
The audience for your description and analysis are the members of the discourse community itself and your academic peers.
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