Project 3 Introduction:
The sport of ice hockey was invented in Canada in the
early 19th century on frozen ponds and rivers. Hockey, for those who
play it isn’t just a game; it’s a way of life. Millions of people play hockey
across the globe today. It is a community of people that all have the same goal
of winning games, having fun, and making life long friendships. To people who
are not familiar with hockey the sport may be seen or perceived as confusing
due to its fast paced gameplay, rules, and hockey specific language and lingo.
Hockey has been a very important activity that I have been involved in my whole
life. A discourse community is a group of people who share basic values and
assumptions, and ways of communicating about goals they are trying to achieve. I have come to find over the years that hockey is
truly a discourse community. The will and desire to win and compete in hockey
in unlike anything else that I have experience in my whole life. This is truly
the case with the club hockey team at Ohio University. We are a small community
of guys on campus that play hockey. This gives us a unique identity that is
different than anyone else that attends the campus. We all have a common set of
goals to win hockey games while becoming a close tight knit community. Not only
do common goals make up this community, but also the way we communicate with
one another is very unique. Hockey is discourse community unlike any other
community out there.
Project 3 Synthesis:
How exactly do you
identify a group of individuals as a discourse community? According to John
Swales there are 6 defining
characteristics for identifying a group of individuals as a discourse community. These 6 characteristics are common goals, participatory
mechanisms, informational exchange, community specific genres, a highly
specialized terminology, and a high general level of expertise while being
involved in a discourse community. James Paul Gee digs deeper into Swales
ideas about discourse communities. Gee speaks about different types of Discourses
and explains that one cannot simply just be a part of the Discourse, but must
be active and recognized by its members. He also explains the different types of Discourses such as primary and
secondary. Primary being the one
we use to make sense of the world and others and Secondary being the one that we acquire and are given access to.
Alan Wardle writes about fitting in or belonging to a
discourse community. Wardle explains Wenger's
3 modes of belonging; engagement, imagination, and alignment. He
also talks about authority figures in a discourse community and the identity
that is given to each person in the community. Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff all
discuss genre and genre analysis. This relates to Wardle and Gee in the sense
that these articles all discuss the way discourse communities are set up and
how they each have different types of language to communicate with other people
in their communities. Everyone could be part of any discourse community if
special and technical language wasn’t used.
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