Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Teaching notes
This task enables students to think about discourse communities with some individual
examples. It is essential for A Level ‘evaluate’ questions and useful for AS ‘discuss’
questions to have examples to refer to and discuss with reference to frameworks and
theory, and these are usually more easily learnt when, to the student, they are
meaningful and familiar examples, rather than gained from a textbook or teacher.
The data collection task can be set as a prep learning or flipped classroom task to
complete ahead of the lesson, along with the questions – both those about the data
source and those about the data. Alternatively, students could simply collect the data
outside the lesson and then complete the questions with support in the classroom. Data
collection and some brief analysis can be set up and demonstrated in the lesson before
by using education-focused Twitter chats or forums such as #teamenglish, #EngLang or
the TES forum.
The group task needs to be completed with other students and can be a paired or group
work. There can be a feedback session before this task, with some findings collected for
brief discussion.
Lexis: Identify words in your data which are not used elsewhere.
Extension question
What processes have been used to form these words (e.g. acronym, blend, affixation)?
Semantics: Which semantic fields are the most apparent in your data? Select three
fields which you feel are important and list the related vocabulary in a table, as below.
Tally how frequently each word (or a variant – e.g. the plural form) appears.
Identify words in your data which have a special meaning in this context but would not
be understood by ‘outsiders’.
Extension question
Do you know the origin of any of these special meanings?
Grammar: Which sentence functions are most common in your data? Tally them in a
table as below:
Identify any non-standard grammar use in your data (e.g. unusual syntax,
missing/unusual verb use, non-standard pronouns).
To what extent is this non-standard grammar a feature of your chosen community or is it
more related to the online mode of the communication?
Pragmatics: Identify any turns or conversational moves that you feel rely on your
discourse community’s shared resources to interpret.
Are there any misunderstandings or explanations for new people to the community in
your data?
Compare your results with at least one other student. For a broader set of data,
compare in a group of four. Try to have differing communities within your group if
possible.
You should:
Introduce your data sets to one another (use the questions about your data source
to help you).
Explain your key findings using the framework-based questions about your data.
Discuss the extent to which your findings are similar/different for different
communities.
How far is it possible to talk about ‘the language of discourse communities’ as
opposed to ‘the language of x discourse community’ i.e. a specific community?