Alex Penna Albert Wray ENGL 1103 Speech Community Essay What have I learned about speech communities

during the course of the semester in Mr. Wrays English class? Over the past few months of blogging, writing, and expressing my personal views in class, Ive gone from a very limited knowledge of language, speech, and literacy, to a well-understood and practiced expertise when it comes to analyzing them and the part they play in everybodys lives. There are plenty of ways over the course of the semester in which I have demonstrated my ability to understand and relate to different speech communities. Through assigned readings, posting and responding to blog posts, completing a wiki readers guide, and doing a video capture, I have shown my ability to break down speech communities and use examples in my own life to show my understanding of them. So where did my journey begin? The path of understanding speech communities and everything that goes with it has been one Ive been on since I was born! From the earliest stage of my life, my literacy and language awareness has been constantly evolving, changing, and adapting as I learn and grow as a person. The best place to start would perhaps be the first day of Mr. Wrays class. I walked in, not knowing what to expect, but assuming it would be like every other English class Ive ever been enrolled inboring, traditional, and writing intensive. Usually, with a traditional English class, you come in, get lectured to the point of complete and total boredom, then get assigned ungodly amounts of reading, and finally, a strict rubric with guidelines and requirements like MLA source citing for a completely unnecessary paper. What I quickly came to realize is that in Mr. Wrays class, we were going to be doing things differently. We employed different, nontraditional methods of learning that I wholeheartedly support. We used blogs, videos, website building, and so much more to create a new kind of English class. For starters, we used blogging on our very own website as a means of communicating, sharing our opinions, and learning as a group. We would complete our assigned readings and then our class bloggers, usually two or three students at a time, would write a 200-word response to the reading sharing their views and proposing questions to their peers. Each student, including myself, was required to write a 100-word response to the reading as well. This promoted lively and often times sincere conversations that would lead to our class bonding and learning now things about ourselves and our language awareness, literacy paths, etc. For me personally, this was an excellent way to ease into learning about myself as a reader, speaker, and just a person in general. This isnt something you could ever obtain in a regular English class. As we progressed through the blogs, we each gained a better understanding of the speech communities we belong to, the literacy paths weve taken, and perhaps most importantly, we learned that language awareness is vital to our communication as people, regardless of where you come from or your background. An example of this understanding can be best explained through citing Rick Florians blog post; it really resonated with me. His post was mainly about the

language barrier and religious barrier stop us from being about to communicate well together. Ricks post helped other people, including myself, to feel more comfortable expressing our concerns and recognizing those barriers we all have. Mine, for example, is a social barrier. As a theatre major, Im what you might call well odd. Understanding my language barrier, for lack of a better term, was vital in correcting it throughout the course of the semester. Another piece of the learning process that was important in English 1103 was the ungodly amount of writing we did in our daybooks everyday. They became an invaluable resource to gaining a deeper insight into our pasts, present, and futures in terms of our experiences with language. How did scribbling in a composition notebook for 10 minutes a day help me so much? Thats a difficult question to answer. It really just came to the topic that was put up on the board. We were given a time limit and something to write about and our brains and pens did the rest. The end result would prove useful in the process of writing blogs, literacy narratives, and the essay Im currently writing. For example, when we were tasked with writing a letter to the red pen, it was very therapeutic to get my concerns about standardized instruction and my creativity being stifled off my chest because we had to just sit there and write about it. Employing these two pieces of useful exercises, blogging and daybook writing, when they were paired together, really helped to enhance my literacy development. What came after the blogs and the daybook writing? The former and the ladder were somewhat of a training process that allowed me to dig deep enough to write my Literacy Narrative Essay. This almost didnt feel like work, I basically told my life story and explored my past and how it has shaped me into the reader, writer, and person that I am. Now in a college English class, whats the point of telling a little story about how I grew up? Ill admit I was skeptical at first, but when I got the rubric and started to sit and write it, I realized how beneficial and crucial this experience would be. You would be surprised how much you can learn about yourself with 2,000 words and some direction. I was able to recall moments in my life, both good and bad, that made me remember what kind of person I am compared to who I used to be growing up. For example, I can recall things like my Grandmothers passing, which had nothing to do with my essay, but still ran through my brain while recalling events from my life. I recalled friendships that have come and gone, Christmases, birthdays, parties, weddings, funerals, etc. So many things ran through my mind when writing this, its unbelievable, really. After the Literacy Narrative Essay came the Wiki Readers Guide; yet another teaching method that I was skeptical of came into play here. We were tasked with using a website with five different sources to describe a speech community that we felt we belonged to and how it effects our lives and the lives of those around us. The community I chose to discuss and analyze was The Theatre Department at UNCC. I felt like this would be a unique and interesting community to explore because not only is it a rare environment, but it provides a good look into my life and how I interact with the people closest to me. After the Wiki Readers Guide came the most fun and entertaining part of this semester-long assignment/discovery, the Video capture and the context report that went along with it. Not only did my video and report explain my speech community clearly, but it demonstrated it as well. For

starters, I wore a fake moustache throughout the whole thing. I was able to, yet again, discover things about myself that I had not previously thought about through an enlightening and non-traditional assignment. But what was my speech community? This was the question I had to ask myself when the next part of the assignment came, the Speech Community essay also known as this assignment. The speech community I had chosen to analyze is one that I currently belong to, the Theatre Department at UNC Charlotte. As I illustrated in my context report, its a small, tight-knit, and one could say quirky, department that arguably communicate differently than most others outside of the College of Arts + Architecture. We communicate in many different ways. I find myself repeating what I said in the context report but it is vital information to know about my speech community. We often use songs, movie references, TV references, stand up comedy routines, musicals, plays, etc. to communicate. Are you starting to see a common theme here? Each one of these projects, papers, assignments, or whatever else you want to call them, have allowed me to do a great many things. One thing Ive been able to do is learn about myself by reflecting on my past. Another pattern would be the use of modern technology to learn and grow in a creative way. Finally, Ive come to the conclusion that there is not just one way to gain a complete understanding of language, speech communities, speech characteristics, etc. My speech community or my theatre people may be different from someones family community or someones college community. Were all diverse and unique. Every individual is unique and so are his or her processes. My journey during this course has truly opened my eyes to the importance of language in this world and the impact the theatre community has on my life.