1.31 Practice doing discourse analysis

Today you gave your presentations on the shaggy dog stories and you were great! I know this is a lot of new language and that Shaggy Dog stories aren't exactly one of the most popular jokes for your identity group = but you did a great job identifying quesitons to ask and then using the "tools" from Gee to analyze how the jokes worked.

Specically, you used Gee's questions as a starting place to identify and analyze
1) the characteristics of Shaggy Dog stories as a genre
2) relationships created through language (for example=>how connections to Conversations + the role played by Intertextuality made the joke funny or connected to the audience)
3)  how language forms (for example => the punchline as a set of puns, the story form with beginning set up, middle development/presentation of complicating action, end = concluding/wrapping up) and how Social Languages (the way the string  talked "bar" talk, how the waiter in the Panda story talked like a New Yorker) created a setting, developed characters, contributed to the humor, etc.

Thank you for your presentations - and I will be providing some written comments to Blogs 2 & 3 before next class.

Why are we doing this? As I said in class = the purpose of this assignment was to give you practice doing analysis that pays close attention to discourse (language in use) and that uses particular examples from a piece of language as evidence of what that language does or how it is used. What you are doing is discourse analysis = and you will use discourse anlaysis to describe relationships in the data you collect for your research project. The blog posts with practice data analysis are opportunities for you to get low stakes (meaning not hugely important to your grade) feedback on how well you are doing, and what you can do to improve; that way, you will have some experience & confidence by the time you analyze the data for your research project.

For next class:
Read: Branick.  I left extra copies in my mail box at the English Department if you didn't get one.)
Blog 4: Do your own analysis of Shaggy Dog stories. You can dig deeper into the question you started work on with your group, you can apply the questions your group asked to another story, or you can ask another question, or anything else that gives you good practice using Gee's "tools" to analyze language.

Your post should do the following:

1.  State the question about shaggy dog stories your analysis will answer
2.  Use  Gee's language tools/questions as a way to explore the Discourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, Social Languages - and particular language choices in the story you are analyzing.
3. Give specific examples of the language and other features to illustrate the points you make about Dicourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, etc used in the story you are analzying
4. Discuss of any patterns
5. State how your analysis answers the question you asked.

Thanks for the good class today - and have a great weekend.

1.29 Using Gee's tools and questions to analyze language

Note: If you have not sent you NIH training certificate => please do so by next week. I am required to present proof of your training to the Kean University Institutional Review Board. To do so, I need a copy of your training certificate. Once you complete your training, copy the text and paste it into an email & send it to the course email.

 

What counts as writing studies research. We spent some time at the beginning of class talking about what you might do for a research project for this course. You posted some great ideas on your blogs, and I wrote back with some suggestions for how you might turn your idea into a project. One way to narrow and focus your ideas is to develop some specific, focused questions about what particular group of people you want to work with, what specific context you want to look study, what practices (creating profiles on Facebook, what parents/children do together when young children are practicing learning to write letters, the different ways teachers talk to first graders when they introduce writing activities to that are meant to be "fun". . .). I read some titles of talked about some studies from writing research books to generate ideas. These books are available in my office - or I can recommend specific articles. We will be working on finding & narrowing down your topic for a while, so don't panic => just keep on it.

 

Reviewing Gee's tools and questions. 

We had a brief discussion of Discourse, Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality (defined on 44 => and check out how to USE them for language analysis on page 60).

 

Analyzing Shaggy Dog Stories.

We spent the rest of class asking "writing studies" kinds of quesitons about our first data set : the Shaggy Dog Stories posted to the right.

 

Our process was to read the story, to notice:

   

• What intertextual references contributed to the jokes' meaning ("getting" the reference in the closing line => Only you can prevent forest fires. I'm afraid not. Thank God it's Friday. "The check is in the mail."; or appreciating the repetition in 3's, or knowing lawyer jokes, or "a guy walked into a bar" jokes and etc )
• What Discourse you needed to belong to for thejoke to"work" (what the listener/reader needed to know to understand it = features of what Discourses the joke teller assumed the listerner/reader was familiar with).  
• The way the language worked to "build" the punchline (create words with special meanings that "make sense" in the nonsence sentence that is the "moral" of the story).

We talked about these stories one by one, and then started to ask bigger questions (where we had to look at more than one joke), questions like:

 

• "what features does a joke have to include to count as a shaggy dog story?" 
• "what makes shaggy dog stories funny?" 
• "what role does violence play in shaggy dog stories and how does it make them funny?"
• "what are the features of the punchlines in shaggy dog stories?"
• "what language moves do shaggy dog stories make to build the "tension" that results in the "surprise ending" that is the punchline?

At this point I asked you to work in groups. The groups are:

Sarah, Mike

Oriana, Rikki

Devon, Amy

Derrick, Paul

Sharyn, Chris, Alison

Allyson, Yoleiny, Deanna

 

Group assignment:

Each group was asked to decide on a question to ask about Shaggy Dog stories. You were instructed to use Gee's language tools to examine the way the language in the jokes worked and to use what you discovered from answering Gee's questions as "evidence" to answer the overall question you were asking question.

  

Each group should post their "findings" on their blog (so you will 2 or 3 of you will have the same post). You may analyze one shaggy dog story in depth, or you may analyze several of the stories to "prove" a theory about general features of shaggy dog stories

 

For next class:

We will begin next class with presentations on your "findings." Your presentation should hit each of the points listed for Blog 3. You should talk me and your classmates through your reasoning.  I am probably also going to ask you what was hard, what you didn't understand, and what you'd like to work on more to feel more comfortable with discourse analysis.

 

Write: Blog 3 should include:

1. a detailed statement of the question about shaggy dog stories that you set out to answer.
2. list of Gee's language tools/questions that are relevant to your analysis
3. answers to Gee's questions that are relevant to your anlaysis
4. quotes from the joke that serve as your evidence of what the joke does
5. discussion of the patterns and what they suggest with respect to your question

This point of this exercise is to get some practice using Gee's language tools/building task questions to develop an analysis. For this one it is more important to do some exploring than it is to be "right" or even to find an "answer".

 

 

Sample post for Blog 3:

 

1. Question: What kinds of relationships between the listener and the joke teller are built by Shaggy Dog stories? I am analyzing the Lawyer joke as an example of a shaggy dog story that expects the listener to know other lawyer jokes

 

2, 3 & 4 (grouped together)=>answers to Gee's questions that  provide evidence for my answer to the big question along with quotes from the jokes(my data).

 

=>  What sort of relationship or relationships is this piece of language seeking to enact with others (present or not).

 

In the lawyer joke, the joke teller (the person saying the language in the story) is inviting the listener to bash lawyers.

Language choices that characterize this perspecitve includes:

 

• lawyer was quite wealthy = establishes that this is a "rich lawyer" joke (not about public defenders or lawyers who take on social justice issues) and that he lives the "good life" (invites friends to his country house)
• The friend is "eager to get a freebie off a lawyer" = shows that the character in the story sees the lawyer as rich and is glad to have a chance to have fun at the lawyer's expense. Also - this implies that the friend may not really like the lawyer much - but rather just wants to spend a week in the country. The choice of "freebie" and "getting a freebie off" suggests freeloading - rather than friendship.
• The lawyer, seeing the two bears, immediately dashed for cover = lawyer thinks of himself first
• The lawyer ran back to his Mercedes = rich, could have said "car" => Mercedes implies wealth
• "visions of lawsuits from his friend's family danced in his head" = his friend may be dying and he is worrying about lawsuits = characterizes lawyer as primarily concerned with money
• "Would you believe a lawyer who told you the Czech was in the male?"= lawyers as liars.

A listener will not like this joke if they feel lawyers are being unfairly represented.

 

The teller is enlisting the listener in shaming, making fun of, belittling lawyers for being too concerned with their money and for being more concerned with money than with people. It is aggressive - in that it actively portrays the lawyer as overly concerned with money and percieved as a liar.

 

 

=>What perspective on social goods is this piece of language communicating (what is "normal" "right" "good = etc)?

The story communicates (assumes) that it is normal to think of lawyers as liars, that lawyers are usually rich, and self interested. It also suggests that it is normal not to believe lawyers, and that in particular it is normal not to believe what lawyers tell other people about money.

It also assumes that most people will think it is funny to see a lawyer get "what he deserves"

 

Because the lawyer was a habitual liar, the sheriff did not believe him, and now the lawyer will probably have a lawsuit (since we assume the male bear is long gone). This is comic because the lawyer is worried about the lawsuit and not the death of his friend, and because he gets what he deserves = a lawsuit that is indirectly the consequence of the fact that he routinely cheats others.

 

The social goods conveyed by this story are the feeling of superiority/satisfaction the listener/teller share at lawyer's expense.

 

 

=>How does this piece of language connect or disconnect things: how does it make one thing relevant or irrelevant to another?

1. The story makes the fact that the visiting friend is a Czech both apparent = and it holds back the particular naming of that friend as a Czech until the punch line. It calls him "Czechoslovakian" to preserve the surprise at the end.

 

2. The order of the story goes through an escalating list of unsavory characteristics associated with lawyers. The allusions to money and self interest are lower stakes (less damning) that being a liar, and they come first in the joke. So the joke moves from the mildly unattractive characters (selfishly rich, and self interested) to being perceived as a liar = which is the worst. So this language builds up its case, by getting the listener to "agree" with or go along with less obnoxious characteristics before the "big" one at the end.

 

=>What does this story contribute to/say about larger Conversations about lawyers?

It speaks to stereotypes about lawyers that are made clear in "lawyer jokes" = Americans generally resent that lawyers. They generally see lawyers as making money for interpreting laws - mostly made by other lawyers - that ordinary people cannot understand=> and that ordinary people then have to pay lawyers to interpret. It is pretty putting out standard negative stereotypes against lawyers.

 

It adds the idea that lawyers dishonesty can come back to bite them. And that in the end, they are going to face consequences for their bad behavior. This is a common moral belief - that "good will out" and "no ill deed goes unpunished". So this joke draws from those to Conversations.

 

 

=>Intertextuality: This particular joke is like a Lawyer (Blonde, Polish, etc) joke in that it allows people from one perspective or group to poke fun at or say something critical about another group.

 

It is like a Shaggy dog story, in that it makes its criticism through a ridiculous play on words, where the re-defined meanings have been developed word by word in the telling of the joke, and it offers its condemnation or criticism through a pattern where the stakes start out low and get bigger until their is a ridiculous example of what is wrong with the group at the end.

 

5. Relating my discussion back to my overall question. If I were doing a really good job,  of this I would sum up how my answers to Gee's questions work together to answer the main question (stated for point 1). This was meant primarily to show you how to use the Gee questions as part of your analysis, so I didn't do that part.

 

You do not have to do your post in this form. You may list codes, categories, patterns and theories = like the analytic process outlined for the last blog. Or you may answer other questions and present the "quotes" from the stories in other ways. You may also analyze more than one joke and offer a comparison.  Or something else?  The point is to develop an anlaysis.

 

Good luck!

 

1.24 Analysis!

Paying attention to the ideas in Gee. We started class by making sure everyone had a plan for getting a copy of the text, and by reviewing what you understood as the main points in Gee's reading. I asked you to write a "quiz" where you told me what you saw as Gee's main points - and asked any questions/pointed out parts of the chapters that were confusing or that didn't make sense.  I will catch up with whatever we didn't get to in class as we work through the applications of Gee's ideas during class next week.  As we continue through the course = think about how we are using Gee's ideas, and practice using his language. 

Chapters 3 & 4 introduce 4 "tools" as Gee names them: Discourses, Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality. From my perspective, these are more ideas than tools. At the same time, language researchers certainly do use these ideas to identify and classify what we do when we use language, so I guess, in that way they are tools. Chapter 3 focuses on Discourse, and Chapter 4 covers the other 3 terms (see p. 44 for the "short" definitions).


Analysis: Slowing it down + naming what we do as we think.We started out by making a list of some of the words you used to describe what you do when you do analysis. Some of the terms were breaking into parts, critical thinking, studying, coming to a conclusion and making meanings. These are all good general descriptions for analysis. Our work this morning was to pay close attention to our thinking process so we could name the different "moves" we made as we engaged in analytic process.

You worked in groups to solve a particular "brain teaser." I asked you to pay attention to, and to name the different moves you made as you tried to solve the puzzle = and you did. After each group had worked their way through to an answer (awesome) we made a list of the moves you wrote down as you worked. We then grouped the moves into categories, and the list below is what we came up with.

Analytic process for solving the puzzle.

1. Figure out what problem you are solving (identify the problem)

 

2. Coding = noticing the features in your data that are significant to your problem
Notice that there were different shapes

Noticed that orientation counted ?

Notice color ?

Codes = names of features significang in your data

3. Catagorizing

Catefories = groups of things with shared features
Name shapes = trying out what counts as being a particular shape

4. Looking for patterns
Counted how many of each shape

Grouping = which shapes occurred together

Lots of local patterns = which shapes ALWAYS went together

4. Pose a local theory
You used what you noticed about local patterns to pose a “theory” about how the big pattern is built

 

5. Test your local theory to see if it "fits" (can explain what is there) and "works" (can predict/explain the whole body of data)
Test the local pattern to see if it can make a BIG pattern

 

6. Use local theory to pose BIG theory (to explain the whole system)

In addition to noticing these steps, we noticed that this process was not linear.  Thinking is messy, it doesn't go in a straight line. You cycled through these processes, sometimes jumping from one to another - starting int he middle of pattern making and then backing up to decide which features should "count" in the pattern. For example, you might pose a local theory, find that it doesn't "work" and then go back to identify features to figure out why the theory didn't work. This new consideration of features then might lead you to different categories. And so on.

The purpose for doing this exercise was for us to analyze(!) analytic process => to identify and name the "features" of analytic process, to put those features into categories, and to pose a theory about relationships among those categories that can "explain" how analysis works. And that's what we did.

So our definition of analysis is now: 1) to break a process/problem, body of data or other subject of analysis into parts, 2)to name and classify the elements within the data, and to 3) identify patterns in the relationships between different parts so we can explain or interpret how the whole body of data works.  Or something like that.

 

Feedback:  Over the weekend, I will read over your first post and write back to you with some feedback on what I am looking for in terms of a blog post.

For next class:

Read: Gee, Chapter 1 – 4.

Blog 2: In your own words => define analysis. What is it? How does it work? Describe how you might use analysis to study something about writing that interests you.

 

Good class! Have a great weekend and see you on Tuesday.

1.22 Introductions, NIH training, blogs, + what to look for in Gee

 
We spent today's class getting to know one another and talking about what kind of research you might like to do. This course is designed so that you can spend some time studying writing that is relevant to your professional growth - or that is personally valuable to you as a writer. As you can see from the calendar - we will be talking about ideas for research projects for about the first third of the course. So you have some time to think and explore. Pick something you are excited about.

Blogs. The course blogs are an important point of connection for our class. Your posts help you practice using the language researchers use to talk about how writing works and where you can try out ideas. They also create a learning network - where you can check in to see how your classmates replied to assignments and use their answers as input for your own. This is an interactive process - and it is the way learning works. The link list on the side of my blog should be an important resource for you.

In class you set up your blog and sent the link to the course email. If your link works - you should see your blog posted to the right. If it doesn't - we need to be in touch so we can figure out how to get you into the class network.

NIH training. All researchers who study human activities and relationships, and who work at institutions that receive government funding are required to tak training in the ethics of worrking with human subjects. The assignment sheet to the right will direct you to the government site where you can complete your training.

Reading Gee. I went over the assigned reading for Thursday - mostly pointing out terms you should pay attention to. You don't have to completely understand everything in these two chapters (as you see from the calendar, we are going to be reading them, using them, and re-reading them for the first couple of weeks) - but you do need to jump in. Pay attention to important termsdo some thinking about the definitions for: discourse, identity, practice(s), descriptive versus critical discourse analysis (which kind is Gee interested in?), and context. Most importantly, try to understand Gee's language and ideas in terms of your own experience. If you don't get what he is talking about, write questions that you can bring to class. Think about how your research can make use of the questions he associated with the things we build through language.

As I said in class, I am pretty sure all of you know how to do research already. What this class is about - is learning to slow down and talk about the steps in your thinking so you can write about them and explain your findings to others.

For next class:
Get started on the NIH training (assignment sheet is posted to the right)
Read: Gee, Chapters 1 & 2
Blog 1: What kind of writing studies research are you interested in?

1.19 Welcome to ENG 3029 Section 01!

This is the course blog. I  use it to post course documents to:

• to review what we did in class,  
• to provide a "hub" so you can check out your classmates' blogs, 
• and to provide an updated version of what we will be doing in the next class.

I handed out a hard copy of the syllabus and calendar in class with the address for this blog (posted to the right under course documents).  If you lose the syllabus and can't remember the address - if you put "ENG 3029 Section 01 Chandler" into google, it comes up on the first page of hits.

As noted on your calendar, and in the syllabus, the calendar gives an overview of what we will cover and where we will be going.  To make sure you are turning in the right work, working on the right assignments=> you need to check this blog after every class.  I will post "what we did" and "what you need to do for the next class" no later than 9:30 am the day after class (usually earlier = but some days are pretty hectic and I want to leave myself some wiggle room). The dates on the calendar are subject to revision. What is posted on the blog is what we will be doing in class.  If I forget to post the blog by 9:30 the day after class (and this is a real possibility) => please write to the class email to remind me.  We are in this together. . . right?

This is a challenging course - but it is truly exciting.  It can position you to see the world of language in new ways, and it will provide you with tools and practices for seeing beneath "the way things are" in ways you may not have thought of.  It is just about my favorite course in the world to teach, and I am looking forward to our work this semester.

After class today, I will post a blog that reviews what we did in class - and lets you know what to do for next class.  I'm excited about the new approach to materials we will be working with (students from last semester made some great suggestions!) and I am looking forward to see what we, as a class, can add to the world of writing studies research!