Computer Writing and Research Lab | University of Texas at Austin

Barber

Making the shift

Today was profoundly frustrating in two of my three First-year Composition classes. Backstory: we spent all last week participating in student-led group discussions of a handful of essays that my student writers are about to use to construct an essay about the academic discourse community. We've been working all semester with the terms for Discourse Community Analysis provided by James Paul Gee's discussion of discourse identities: language, actions, tools/symbols, and values.