Looking through your notes you did a great job identifying what the author did in each section. Here is a summary of our recommendations for what the author might have done to strengthen the focus, organization, and development in this essay.
- Make a clear statement of the essay's focus on coaches as a discourses community and their use of multiliteracies up front at the very beginning.
- Delete references (reviews of other research articles) that do not connect to the essay's methods or findings.
- Add more discussion of Swales criteria for discourse communities + more discussion of what is meant by multiple literacies within the context of coaching.
- Use a statement of what the essay will "do" (In this paper I will use Swales' criteria for a discourse community and the concept of multiliteracies to show how literacy identities and practices are central to football coaching. I begin with a description of my methods etc etc.) as a transition to the body of the paper.
- The class consensus seemed to be that the methods section was pretty good (though the set up with Swales should have been in the intro).
- Develop the discussion of the findings in terms of the focus that is set up in the introduction. Do this for each point. If the goals/genres/lexis have different features than those pointed out by Swales - point out the differences and discuss why/whether this changes coaches standing as a discourse community. Also - with the discussion of multiliteracies, relate it back to the definition set up in the intro,
- Write a stronger conclusion which sums up findings, points out the study's limitations + strengths (if any) and point out what the study contributes to or suggests about questions for further research,
Although these suggestions are presented in a bulleted list, and while the sequence represents a kind of "standard" organization - this is not a formula. You each will be doing slightly different projects, and where and how you divide your paper into headings will vary. These "moves" will be important, but you will each make them in a way that suits your material and purpose.
Thank you. I appreciate that we are using new language and talking about writing a different kind of research paper, and it is risky to give answers to my (often baffling) questions during class. Thanks to those of you who volunteer - and to those of you who answer when I call on you. Truly it is the participation that makes the class work. Hopefully our classroom will feel increasingly comfortable as we move through the term.
For next class:
I will start on Thursday with some practice creating research questions using Blog 5 as our data. We will look at the posts from the in-class ethnographic experience and think about what kind of research questions we might ask of this data. So come to class with some ideas. Or with an awareness of the kinds of problems you might have in thinking up research questions.
After that we will talk briefly about oral history and then you will do an oral history interview. Before you come to class, check out the apps for voice recording that you can use with your phone. You will use your phone to document the interview. If you don't have a phone that can record, we will make sure you have a partner who does.
Read: Best practices for oral history.
Blog 6: In class we talked about the differences among a topic, a focus, and the particular research quesstions you might ask as you conduct your research. Each of you are in a different place in terms of developing your project - but where every you are - write into your material as far as you can go in terms of your topic, the specific focus you want to take to that topic, and (if possible) what in particular you want to find out within that focus = what you want to do in your study (your research questions = what you will ask about your data). The more you write - the more we have to work with.
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