For project four, The Discourse Community Ethnography, I am going to observe and analyze my place of employment, Bagel Street Deli. Bagel Street Deli is a local deli in Athens Ohio. It has been around for many years and it is a crowd favorite in the area. I am a member of this discourse community because I work there. I have been working there since spring of my freshman year (I am now a junior). I think this would be an adequate discourse community to analyze and report on because as employees at Bagel Street Deli we have a way of communicating that may seem foreign and/or incomplete to an outsider or non-native. We refer to certain items or ingredients in the deli by nicknames or abbreviations. There is a certain language that we as Bagel Street Deli employees pick up on, and the longer you work there the more comfortable you become with this particular language. In my project I am going to focus on the differences between a new member or “rookie” verse a “veteran” of the discourse community. I will be asking a rookie and a vet the same interview questions and analyzing the differences and similarities between the two members of the community.
I think it will be interesting to analyze this particular discourse community because I have worked at other restaurants in the past and I think it will be interesting to see how this discourse community compares to the others that I have worked at. I hope to learn how the language and ways of communication affect the group dynamic and comradery of the employees or group members. Being part of this community, I recognize that establishing a good reputation within the community goes hand in hand with being able to understand the lexis and ways of communication within the community. It takes times to build your way up to being respected within the group. I’m going to add and build on what Ann Johns touches on when she discusses authority. Except when it comes to Bagel Street it is more of hierarchy then actual authority with the members. Although we do have authority, owners and managers obviously have authority over most employees, but I want to focus more on the hierarchy of the regular workers within the community. I will try to add to the conversation by touching on the relations and hierarchy or members.
A source I will focus on when writing this ethnography will be “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice” by Ann M. Johns. I will focus on her section discussing Issues of Authority. Another source I will be referring to is the article we most recently read by Elizabeth Wardle entitled “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in a New Workplace.” This particular article relates very well to the angle that I plan on going with my ethnography because Wardle discusses the modes or ways a newcomer uses to inherit a sense of belonging within the discourse community. Since I intend on focusing on that as well, this article will I’m sure prove to be extremely beneficial. Another source from Writing About Writing that I plan on using in my ethnography is “The Concept of a Discourse Community” by John Swales. I will refer to Gee’s 6 characteristics of a discourse community in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” as well. I will majorly use Gee and Swales for my description of Bagel Street Deli, and convincing my audience that it is in fact a suitable discourse community to study. I will draw more from Wardle and Johns to state my points and to add to the ongoing conversation of the discourse communities.
Ok. This is a really good start Emily because you already have such a good grasp on how you're going to use the sources and what you might be able to add to the conversation. I really like this idea of looking at authority and you can certainly use Johns to do this. You can talk about how members attain authority, how they exhibit authority, and also how advanced members of the community issue "authoritative utterances" which shape the culture of the community (see Johns. In doing so, you'll be providing specific data about a specific community to help us understand how authority operates in discourse communities and how it affects language use/writing/speaking.
ReplyDeleteYour plan to use Wardle to examine how newcomers become members of the community is also a good, specific plan for using a source. The larger conversation here is identity and it's not as confusing as Wardle makes it out to be. What she's basically saying is that set group processes are central to an individual's formation of their identity. It would be interesting to try to gear some interview questions to your newcomer about what they see as shared goals, how they imagine themselves meeting those goals, and how they modify their personality to fit into the community.
Good Work!