Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Blog 4: Is Our Class a Discourse Community?


In our class meeting on Tuesday, Dr. Chandler put the class into groups and gave us each the task of determining whether or not our class was a discourse community based on John Swales’ six criteria. In my group, Amanda, David, and I discussed each point on Swales’ list and gave reasons for why it applied it our class. We didn’t allow ourselves to make a definitive answer until we went through all six specifications. Our results were as follows.

“1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.”

- Our class has the common exigence of wanting to learn about research in Writing Studies, completing our research projects, and ultimately passing the class. We also have the formal objectives that were given to us in the beginning of the semester in the course syllabus.

“2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.”

- Our class has multiple means of communications, some we have used, yet others we have not. For communication purposes, we have the blogs, emails, classroom discussions, and group work. Not only are these mechanisms valuable when speaking to other classmates, but they are also vital when conversing with the instructor!

“3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.”

- This feature ties into the one before it because without communication mechanisms, there would be no opportunity or way to swap information or give feedback. Through blogs my classmates and I can give each other feedback and receive feedback from the professor. Through emails we can contact everyone in the classroom. However, the two most essential of all these methods are the class discussions and the group work. These are the times that we are actively learning and processing what we are being taught or what we read about for homework. In the classroom is where we get the most information and have the most opportunities to interact with the information we are learning.

“4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.”

- This point gave our group some difficulty, so we decided to skip it and return it to later. Unfortunately, class ended before we could look further into it. However, if I were to analyze this alone, based on Swales explanation, I would say that our class continues to progress closer to our intended goals, listed in point one, with each class meeting, required reading, and blog assignment. Each time we master a topic, Dr. Chandler guides us to the next step. We are not on a consistent track; we are constantly ascending to new heights!

“5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.”

- As Dr. Chandler often says, Writing Studies has its own language. Slowly, our class is learning this new way of speaking and writing through all the activities that we do. In fact, our most recent assignment of constructing a list of rhetorical analysis terms proves the validity of our growing lexicons.  

“6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.”

- First of all, our class is full of people who have an above average level of understanding of Writing Studies because we all are English majors of some sort. Secondly, we all come from different backgrounds and have varying experience, which both result in a mix of different perspectives that we each bring to our classroom discussions. Thirdly, and most prominent of all, our classroom has the most essential and valuable resource, a professor. Since we are college students, without an instructor to teach us material, we might get somewhere alone, but definitely not to where this course is meant to take us! Her level of expertise on Writing Studies and how Dr. Chandler communicates it is exactly what we need to bring us to our final goals of this class. In a sense, we are the audience and she is our rhetor in our context of the classroom. She analyzes the material and conveys it in a way that our class will effectively learn it.

All in all, through all the points we covered and the evidence we gathered, it is clear that our class is a discourse community.

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