Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Reading Response 15

Getting Ready to Read
I play soccer and I (sometimes) attend a church.  These activities do not affect the way I participate in the other one because I view them as different parts of my life and don't consider how I do the one activity while doing the other.

Summary
In his article “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” James Paul Gee explains his concept of Discourse.  He argues that a Discourse is place or group where you act, value, believe, speak, and write a certain way while you are in it.  Discourses may have different characteristics, such as being your primary Discourse (the first one you every enter), a secondary Discourse (ones that you join), dominant, or non-dominant.  Gee argues that you cannot engage in a discourse but not be fluent in it.  You must be fluent in every one of your Discourse, otherwise you will be viewed as an outsider.

Synthesis
This article relates to James Porter’s article “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” as well as John Swales’ article “The Concept of the Discourse Community.”  What Gee just calls Discourse is what Porter and Swales call the discourse community.  The main difference between Swales’ article and Gee’s article is that Swales goes into detail about discourse communities and their properties while Gee writes more about the kinds of Discourses and people’s relationships to them.

Response
Gee managed to describe Disco urse in a way that was much more enjoyable to read than Swales with Discourse community.  This article was actually interesting, I almost didn't fall asleep while reading.  I also found this article way easier to understand than Swales' article

QD
1.  Different groups of people in different places expect you to talk in different ways.  If you are around people that don't use perfect grammar and use a certain slang, then to talk with perfect English and no slang would be wrong because you would be out of place.  This conflicts with what I have been taught because I was never taught to consider talking with slang because of where I am.

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