Part 1—Inquiry and Learning: Studying Discourse Communities

Who our students are

First year university studentsFrom diverse cultural and linguistic

backgrounds—immigrant, minority, and/or working class

Many learning mainstream academic English as a second language, dialect, or code

Their typical prior experience with language and schooling

Internalized the attitudes of the surrounding society toward their language/culture

Ambivalent about acquiring the language of power in US society as a threat to identity

May see their English as bad EnglishOften see themselves as bad writers

and fear that they are not capable of college work.

My larger goals: to help writers

To appreciate the discourse of their homes and communities

To perceive the discourse competence they bring from those communities

To better understand the communicative value of all varieties of language by being exposed to many languages and varieties

To respect the language of others

New Understandings

They are competent language users in familiar contexts

Everyone is an outsider to new contextsAcquisition of new language/style

comes with participation in new community

Risk-taking to develop new competenceMixed varieties (errors) are a normal

part of acquisition process

Curriculum

• Readings about others’ experiences with language and literacy,

• A series of informal research reports on language practices of different communities students belong to

• Designed to help students develop meta-knowledge about language by studying their own uses of languages, dialects, and discourses in different contexts

Why Study Discourse Communities

Position students as expertsDraw on familiar, prior knowledgeReframe in academic ways

What we do: the how of our discourse community studies

Tape, transcribe (and translate), and analyze conversations in a home language, dialect, and/or primary discourse (what, why, and how)

Observe conversational settings, styles, genres, insider terms, shared values

Read ethnographies of communication (Heath, Willis, Spradley, and student researchers)

Freshman Writing Text

KutzLongman (Pearson)2004

Cafeteria Conversations

Pebely Vargas: friends from DSPThemes: “Our lives haven’t been

easy.” “We will be there for each other as much as possible.”

“Our stories ‘may highlight the ridiculous but [they] often also provides illustration of hard lessons of life the story-teller and the audience share’ (Heath, 225).”

Conversation: Speech Acts

Speech Acts: teasing, supporting, gossiping, naming things ghetto

Defining Ghetto. “Ghetto is something not everyone would do, such as “watering down ketchup.”

Conversational Data

Pebely: That dude over there . . .Benny: He got a paper clip for the antenna on

his phone.Pebely: He got a what? (all laughing). . .a

paperclip.Benny: It is and then. . .no isn’t it? Ghetto.Laysian: Do you have a phone, Benny?Benny: I don’t.Laysian: No you don’t so don’t (laughing)Benny: Yo, I rather not have a phone than

have a paperclip as an antenna on it.

Conversation: Analysis

“That would be announcing to everybody who sees him with the phone that he is ghetto. Being ghetto is something that you try to hide because it is admitting you are different than others. The only reason that being ghetto is accepted in our group is because it is used for humorous purposes and we don’t look down on each other. We all have aspects in our lives that might be considered ghetto.”

“What I learned. . .”

“through studying my discourse community was that we all bring a piece of our other discourse communities to college.”

“We are able to bring our neighborhoods into the group by using words that are characteristic of our neighborhoods. . .and tell[ing] stories relating to issues that have to do with where we are from.”

“We use our little community to represent who we truly are.”

What we learned

Our students were Engaged in these inquiries Successfully “translating” their

understandings into academic studies Interested in what their peers were

discovering Learning from each other across very

different different academic skill levels But some of the potentially powerful peer

learning was limited by too little class time