ROW: 98-109

SUMMARY:

In ‘Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities’ there are 3 authors that are apart of this article, Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff. They use the idea of genre to study discourse communities. They examine several contexts of language exchange in which the use of genre theory may yield insight into teaching, research, and social interaction: legal practice, medical practice, and classrooms.

In Amy Devitts essay she examines jury instructions as a genre, considering how the genre affects the interactions of jurors in ways that inhibit the successful execution of their duties. Anis Bawarshi uses the patient medical-history form to suggest how a specific textual genre works in and provides critical access into doctors offices. Mary Jo Reiff discusses how the combination of ethnography and genre analysis can give teacher, researchers, and students clearer ways to understand their classrooms. The essays are all put together into one article because they suggest how genre analysis contributes to the use of ethnomethodology as a research technique that focuses on language and society and that is especially eligible to contribute to the pedagogy of text-dependent subject matters. 

CONNECTIONS:

 Personally I connected this one to Swale. I felt like they went about the same way of talking about discourse communities. They each talked about different things that make up a discourse community. They also explain what they think a discourse community is. 

OPINIONS:

I liked how the reading was broken up into sections. It makes it easier for me to read and follow. I personally liked the Reiff article the best because it talked somewhat about teachers and their classrooms. My major currently is education, so I found this article most interesting compared to the other two.