...So what is a discourse community? When you google discourse community, you read, “It is a group of people sharing a common goal using communication to reach that common goal.”Getting more into detail what exactly is a discourse community, we have John Swales’ academic essay, ‘The Concept of Discourse Community’, which breaks it down into six characteristics: “1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5. In addition...
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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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...What would you say is Swales’ overall thesis for this article? What is he trying to prove? I believe Swale's overall thesis is that, the current definition for discourse community is vague and suggestive; centered around some main ideas but is still not well defined. I believe he is trying to prove that a specific set of characteristics must be present in order to define a discourse community. What discourse communities do you belong to professionally and personally? What discourse community do you hope to belong to in a future profession? Name at least one from each category. Professionally, I belong to the retail discourse community because I am currently working at Victoria's Secret. Personally, I belong to the discourse community of business...
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...Robert Kelly Holly Kopcha ENGL 2089 106 3/6/2016 Marching Band The marching band is a community all their own. They all speak to each other in a language that is all their own. It was always easy to spot someone in school who was a “band kid” because of the way they carried themselves or the way they talked or the people they associated with. Kids in the marching band hang out with each other during and outside of school. They are a community all their own with unique characteristics. The marching band has specific goals that they set for themselves as well as for the group. Individually the members of the marching band have their own goals that they need to accomplish for the ultimate goal of making the group better. Each member will practice their music at home or in the practice rooms during class in order to get better at memorizing and accenting their music. They do this to help the group sound better when they are at competition. Band member also have a goal to memorize their drill sheets. This helps them to where they are supposed to be on the field at a certain time. Doing this helps the group look more unified in their formations. The group’s goals are to perform well at competitions and ultimately win a trophy for their school. To obtain this goal the group will practice for 2-4 days a week. Depending on the day or what needs work they will either work on drill or their music. Drill is the position in which the person should be in a specific time during...
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...Micro-Ethnography discourse communities exist worldwide from communities who represent single mothers, to employees working within the workforce, to those who commute to work every day where they may be involved in either leadership or support roles, to those who participate in sports, or those who simply participate in extracurricular activities such as a church group or simply groups of people whom share the same goals, language, interests, or practices, or religion. Social discourse communities encompass any group of 2 or more members which share a common set of goals or duties or simply share a similar group dynamic. Within Gee’s “What Is Literacy?” Gee identifies the broad definition of a discourse. Gee writes, A socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network. (1) Most can easily identify with many separate discourses as a result from their raising such as in “Speaking in Tongues” or as a result of their education and adaptability to their environments as in “First They Changed My Name”. Human’s ability to adapt uses our “Get in where you fit in” mind set. Acting as one’s camouflage allows us as humans to avoid sticking out and instead encourages our abilities to blend in with the crowd and not be treated differently or singled out from the majority. While working within a very upstanding company, I was recently promoted to Environmental...
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...To maintain order in a community, one must adapt to the way of life in that community. In this sample discourse community analysis, the author speaks about joining the band community, and what kind of things he/she had to adapt to, and learn in order to successfully be part of said community. The author begins to build his/her credibility by effectively using the following strategies: diction, point of view, and tone. With the use of these devices, the author is able to appeal to their classmates on a more personal rather than professional level. In this essay, the author talks about having to learn about “the pyramid of sound,” which he/she states is very important in the band community. When describing the importance of this skill, the...
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...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 connected to each other. I used transferability to apply the knowledge that I got from each of the three sources and created an argument that I could synthesize with each other. This paper gave me the opportunity to express my ideas but what I had to write about was more about the three sources rather than using those three sources too support my ideas. Writing may be learned at first but...
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...are three certifications that AAPL offer: registered, registered professional, and certified profession. Registered landmen (RL) are at the starting level of their career, this qualification exemplifies a fundamental knowledge of the land industry as well as an employee’s will to extend their education. The second level of certification is a Registered Professional Landman (RPL). This is the mid-level designation offered by AAPL and distinguishes a landman as knowledgeable, experienced, and professional. Members of this group are generally perceived as very accountable people and influence others to have higher standards of participation in their profession. They act upon out-groups within the same industry such as organizations in law, engineering, geology, and banking companies to efficiently initiate and complete...
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...Case Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Cape Town Abstract In this paper it is suggested that the themes of alienation and engagement offer a productive alternative perspective for characterising the student experience of learning in higher education, compared to current dominant perspectives such as that offered by approaches to learning and related concepts. A conceptual and historical background of the concept of alienation is presented, followed by an overview of some contemporary perspectives. Drawing on this literature, a framework is then developed for characterising student learning. It comprises three categories, referring to the alienation resulting from 1. entering the higher education community, 2. fitting into the higher education community, and 3. staying in the higher education community. Each category has an associated set of theoretical tools that can be drawn upon in analysing this aspect of the student experience. Keywords: alienation, engagement, student learning, tertiary education, approaches to learning Address for correspondence: Dr J Case, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa Email: jcase@chemeng.uct.ac.za Phone: +27 21 650 2751 Fax: +27 21 650 5501 Alienation and engagement: Development of an alternative theoretical framework for understanding student learning Jennifer Case Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Cape Town ...
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...TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL ISOLATION It is too hard to imagine a world without the Internet. It has revolutionized the way our culture treats almost everything from watching television to socializing. It has affected the globe economy & has been a boon for corporations & independent entrepreneurs alike. Technology and human life can't be differentiated; society has a staggering reliance on innovation. We utilize innovation, rely on upon engineering in our everyday life and our needs and requests continue climbing. The age old tenet has been overlooked since our reliance on engineering, "with incredible force comes extraordinary obligation" (Stan Lee "Stunning Spiderman"). We have disregarded the cautioning signs, the mental wellbeing issue that have raised their terrible heads as a consequence of our reliance. The contention for innovation is the increment of criminal arraignment in light of social networking; long range interpersonal communication makes new social associations. Understudies are improving in school, better personal satisfaction, online networking as a wellspring of work, yet the negatives are difficult to simply clear under a carpet. Understudies who are investing a lot of time on online networking destinations have lower scholastic evaluations, social networking is the reason for less eye to eye correspondence, social average locales in charge of the ascent in tormenting that has gone digital and the suicides from that new manifestation...
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...to university students. This is an important issue as there is widespread debate as to what constitutes effective EAP instruction within the academic sphere. The conflicting perspectives are that a critical approach to pedagogy, with its challenge of current ‘implicit and explicit standards’ (Cherryholmes: 1988) is most effective. Other academics argue the case of a vulgar pragmatic approach that relies on structure and ‘the notions of theory and practice’ (Williams: 1983). There is also support for a hybrid approach to EAP learning, known as critical pragmatism. This method encourages the characteristic critical pedagogical challenge of the status quo, while still requiring ideas to be translated and conveyed by means of structured ‘discourse practices’ (Cherryholmes: 1988). Finally, upon examining the aforementioned approaches to EAP by review of scholarly literature, I intend to argue affirmatively that vulgar-pragmatic based pedagogy is the best and most effective method of teaching EAP to university students. The concept of critical pedagogical learning relies on the principle that ‘the classroom needs to be continually interrogated for the ideologies it fosters and reproduces’ (McLaren: 2011). This means that ‘criticalists’ (those who support a critical approach) prefer a system of education that challenges students to think beyond what is taught and form their own opinions; to broaden their thoughts and to construct their own voice (Palmer, Emmon: 2004). Burbules and...
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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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...person, and as a scholar. As a person who has lived her life at the intersection of being a woman and a person of color, I am committed to having an impact on academia that benefits all people, specifically those who are situated at the intersection of socially constructed factors. As a result, I have crafted my program of research to understand the complexities of identity and how those complexities present themselves within, and are related to, academic pursuits. I believe my program of research, coupled with my desire to improve academia for all people, will contribute to the National Center for Institutional Diversity’s scholarly agenda of demography, democracy, and discourse. This contribution is represented in my proposed research statement, which focuses on exposing the experiences of engineering students of both genders and various racial and ethnic backgrounds....
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...professional knowledge and abilities and how such knowledge and abilities affect success. The Webster’s New Pocket Dictionary defines profession as “an occupation that requires training and specialized study.” A method in which one receives such training and specialized study, is through a membership in a professional organization or association. “Traditionally, professionalism has been related to the ways in which professional communities manage a certain field of knowledge by, for example, controlling access to work and monitoring standards and requirements in educational programs” (Karseth, Nerland, 2007, p. 335). One particular professional association who manages their field of knowledge is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM is one of the world’s largest professional, educational, and scientific computing societies. This association has more than 92,000 members. The ACM also manages several Special Interest Groups, such as the Specialty Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). SIGSOFT represents software engineers in both political and legal matters. The ACM provides its members with the resources for lifelong learning. One such...
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... Swales' (1990) rhetorical approach to genre analysis was used to investigate eighteen meeting minutes which revealed the occurrence of seven moves with each having its own communicative purpose and linguistic features which characterize the genre as a formal one. The study has implications for genre studies in the area of pedagogy and further research. Key words: genre, minutes, discourse, moves, steps, Ghana. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Minutes is a highly formal written genre situated in the domain of business discourse and is an official record and considered a legal document by auditors, IRS and the law courts. Oxford defines it as a written record of what is said and decided at a meeting. It is used by institutions, corporate bodies and varied organisations. Its main communicative purpose is to record and relay information to the members of that discourse community. It also gives members the platform to express their views and opinions and take decisions on pertinent issues and admonish or caution the users of that genre. Swales and Feak (2009:1), define genre as ‘a type of text or discourse designed to achieve a set of communicative purpose’. According to Holmes, these communicative purposes are distinctive structural patterns which distinguish one genre from another and at the same time identify a group of...
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