Part 1—Inquiry and Learning: Studying Discourse Communities

Who our students are First year university students From 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 English Often 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 contexts Acquisition of new language/style comes with participation in new community Risk-taking to develop new competence Mixed 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 experts Draw on familiar, prior knowledge Reframe 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 Kutz Longman (Pearson) 2004

Cafeteria Conversations Pebely Vargas: friends from DSP Themes: “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