Group items tagged

Discourse communitySwales (1990) found that a discourse communityhas a broadly agreed set of common public goalshas mechanisms of intercommunication among its membersuses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedbackutilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative utterance of its aimshas acquired some specific lexis (specialized terminology, acronyms)has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.  

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

Good unit plan on Homer's Iliad done by a student teacher for a portfolio. Some good handouts and questions.

I'm all for using pop culture references in teaching, and I did read what Shmoop had to say on this particular video, but would you really feel comfortable sharing this video in class and having a discourse on it? I'm a Jay-Z fan and a hip hop lover from its earliest days, but this video and song are reprehensible on so many levels. With so much else that we can "source" for instruction, why this? Please help me understand. And don't say it's a gangsta thang.

To answer your first question about showing the music video: absolutely not. Why this? I'm still struggling with it. We're in an age where we are entertained by self destruction. Kanye (unfortunately, because I was a fan of his earlier work) is definitely becoming one of the monster / Charlie Sheen / Jersey Shore / reality TV burnouts. And yet, there is an audience for it... When I first skimmed the analysis, I thought I'd go back to see if Schmoop was established enough to have a worthy application of Freud to Kanye. Alas, I was mistaken. I haven't become a fan of Schmoop; they've got some work to do. I'm sorry I misplaced my "under investigation" tag in ECN's collection.