English 1102
Jonathan Sanders
What English 1102?
English 1102-064 is a class taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte by Mrs. Julie Cook. This is a semester long class where we focused on several different topics which include: Discourse, discourse community, inquiry, and genre theory. We have a semester long paper that we had to write as well as this e-portfolio. The course description is as follows: Students develop an extended inquiry project that integrates materials from varied sources and includes writing in multiple genres. Students write, revise, edit and reflect on their writing with the support of the teacher and peers.Students also immerse themselves in a conversation about a topic through reading, questioning, and process writing. Polished writing might assume the forms of presentations, reviews of research, essayistic arguments, or multi-media and web-based projects. Students learn to distinguish rhetorical contexts, practice different conventions, and develop positions in relation to research. They also adopt digital technologies to network, compose, and/or critique and disseminate their work. Grades are derived primarily from portfolios that include work generated throughout the term. In my own words, what the course description means is that we learn how to incorperate the use of technology today, tridtional writing methods, and the concepts taught in class to create works that revolve around research.
What Did We Learn?
In English 1102, we focused on four specific topics. Here is a short overview of them:
1.) What is a Discourse Community? For the first part of the class we dove into what a discourse community is. According to Ann John's article Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity, a discourse community is “the focus is on texts and language, the genres and lexis that enable members throughout the world to maintain their goals, regulate their membership, and communicate efficiently with one another.” From this for a discourse community to be a discourse community, it has to abide by six rules that are provided in the text. It has come from our learning that everyone is involved in multiple discourse communities. For example, I am part of the education discourse community, the military discourse community, the lifeguard discourse community, the church discourse community, and many more. Anyone and everyone can join a particular discourse community by many methods and there are an infinite amount of discourse communities that a person can join!
2.) What is a Discourse? Not be confused with discourse communities, Discourse, and yes it is given with a “D”, is different from discourse communities. According to James Paul Gee’s article Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, a Discourse is “with a capital "D" is "composed of distinctive ways of speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading coupled with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing, with other people and with various objects, tools, and technologies, so as to enact specific socially recognizable identities engaged in specific socially recognizable activities.” According to this definition, Discourse is essentially how a certain discourse community goes about doing its activities and also what the value in the discourse community.
3.) What is Inquiry? Another topic that we discussed, which lead to our major group assignment, is the idea of inquiry. According to Stuart Greene’s and April Lidinsky’s piece from Inquiry to Academic Writing, inquiry is “central to the process of composing” meaning that inquiry is essential whenever starting a new research paper. Inquiry is essentially asking a questions, but there are certain rules to follow: 1. Identify what is open to dispute, 2. Resist binary thinking, 3. build on and extend the ideas of others, 4. Read to discover a writer's frame, 5. Consider the constraints of the situation. All though these rules may seem confusing but in the end you make the question you ask be specific for the topic you talking about.
4.) What is Genre Theory? The last topic we discussed is the idea of genre theory. In Deborah Dean’s work Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being, genres are defined as “messy and complex”. From this quote Dean means that genres are so broad that it is hard to classify them. But all genres have seven characteristics: Social, Rhetorical, Dynamic, Historical, Cultural, Situated, and Ideological. All of these characteristics of genre are related to each other and all genres are all of these at the same time.
For more detailed explinations check out the subpages!