Patricia kuhl ted talk summary

What is Literacy? ...and how does it relate to Discourse Community?

...and what is a Discourse Community?

Gee: What is Literacy? ←Let’s watch a quick video that breaks down the readings for this week in simple terms. While watching the video, brainstorm: --What are some discourse communities you belong to? --What are some of your literacies (what could you teach someone else about)?

Some ideas here More ideas here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEB4rAZanpM
https://medium.com/literacy-discourse
https://www.uclalawreview.org/category/discourse/
Primary Discourse (Home Language) -- Primary Language Acquisition Happens in Speech Communities

TedTalk: “The Birth of a Word”- Deb Roy (Required)

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

TedTalk: “The Linguistic Genius of Babies”- Patricia Kuhl (Recommended)

Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word/transcript?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies/transcript
What is “Literacy”? -Oxford Companion to the English Language “The ability to read and write in at least one language...In the 20c, however, the ability to read and write has been delimited in many ways and literacy is often used interchangeably with functional literacy: the production and understanding of simple oral or written statements reflecting the social, economic, and educational conditions of a particular region. Yet the threshold of literacy is indeterminate, making exact measurements difficult or culturally variable. In 1965, at a world congress of ministers of education, UNESCO adopted the view that ‘rather than an end in itself, literacy should be regarded as a way of preparing man (sic) for a social, civic and economic role that goes far beyond the limits of rudimentary literacy training consisting merely in the teaching of reading and writing’ (‘Literacy, Gateway to Fulfillment’, special issue of UNESCO Courier, June 1980).” (emphasis mine)

https://www-oxfordreference-com.libproxy.lib.csusb.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199661282.001.0001/acref-9780199661282-e-728
https://www-oxfordreference-com.libproxy.lib.csusb.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199661282.001.0001/acref-9780199661282-e-496#
Literacy is Socially Constructed Gee says literacy is the control of secondary discourses.

Literacy goes beyond simply learning to read, write, and speak in a particular language because the ability to understand/interpret language is developed through social processes (think enculturation or socialization). We learn language and meaning through conversation and interaction. In order to produce and interpret language well (to be literate), we must participate in that culture to learn all of the subtle and obvious meanings embedded within those words and references.

To become literate in anything, we read & listen, ask questions, and practice/participate until we “get it”

Literacy & Authority Who decides what is “literate” and “illiterate”? Who is considered authoritative? Who makes the rules?

Click on these links for examples from Mean Girls

Mean Girls: Map of Cafeteria

Mean Girls: The Rules of Girl World

“Teenage Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) was educated in Africa by her scientist parents. When her family moves to the suburbs of Illinois, Cady finally gets to experience public school and gets a quick primer on the cruel, tacit laws of popularity that divide her fellow students into tightly knit cliques. She unwittingly finds herself in the good graces of an elite group of cool students dubbed "the Plastics," but Cady soon realizes how her shallow group of new friends earned this nickname.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ_qXmxdgGM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEWsqLKlEr4
Academic literacy is just one kind of literacy- there are many more types of literacy than what you are taught in school.

J. Gee, Defining “Discourse”: “Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of 'identity kit' which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize” (“Discourses,” 142).

“A Discourse is a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or 'social network', or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful 'role'”(143).

“It is sometimes helpful to say that it is not individuals who speak and act, but rather historically and socially defined discourses speak to each other through individuals. The individual instantiates, gives body to, a discourse every time he acts or speaks and thus carries it, and ultimately changes it, through time. Americans tend to be very focused on the individual, and thus often miss the fact that the individual is simply the meeting point of many, sometimes conflicting, socially and historically defined discourses”( “What is Literacy?” 3).

Defining “Discourse Community”: According to B. Herzberg, the “use of the term ‘discourse community’ testifies to the increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups. The pedagogies associated with writing across the curriculum and academic English now use the notion of ‘discourse community’ to signify a cluster of ideas: that language use in a group is a form of social behaviour, that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group’s knowledge and of initiating new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic or constitutive of the group’s knowledge” (qtd. in Swales 21).

Pat Bizzell (Academic Discourses and Critical Consciousness 1992) writes “‘discourse community’ is a group of people who share certain language-using practices” (1) whose community practices are “conventionalized” in stylistic conventions and canonical knowledge.”

6 Characteristics for the Conceptualization of Discourse Community from J. Swales' “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Writing About Writing 1. "A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals." Why does this group exist? What are its shared goals? What does this group do? 2. "A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members." How do group members communicate/share information with each other? Are they participatory? 3. "A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback." What are the purposes of the group’s communications? What informational opportunities are available to the group? How does communication further the group’s goals? 4. "A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims." Which of the above communications are considered genres (conventional textual responses to recurring rhetorical situations that provides a recognizable pattern for providing specific kinds of information that all group members recognize and understand)? What are some conventions of these genres? 5. "In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis." What kinds of specialized language (community-specific shared terminology) do group members use in spoken and written communication? What language is used for efficient communication among members? 6. "A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise." Who are the group members with expertise? Who are the group members with less expertise? What is the ratio between experts and novices in the ever-changing membership of the group? How do newcomers learn the appropriate language, genres, and knowledges of the group?

Burkean Parlor: “Unending Conversation” (listen here) “Where does the [discourse]* get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we were born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him, another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. 1941. Univ. of California Press, 1973. 110-111.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5-hvJX1iUs
https://archive.org/details/philosophyoflite00inburk/page/110/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/philosophyoflite00inburk/page/110/mode/2up
According to Kenneth Bruffee, “Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation” (646-7).

Academic literacy involves communities of experts having conversations/ debates amongst themselves →

It’s why we cite our sources.

More on this in our next module.

Works Cited: Bruffee, Kenneth. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’.” College English. 46.7 (1984): 635-652. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Now, read and take notes: Required:

Gee: What is Literacy? Youtube video

Burkean Parlor

TedTalk: “The Birth of a Word”- Deb Roy

Melter, “Understanding Discourse Communities” (2020) (only read p 100-106)

Gee, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” and “What is Literacy?” (1989) (summary here)

Recommended:

Swales, “The Concept of a Discourse Community” (1990) (summary here)

“Identity Kits: Understanding James Paul Gee’s ‘Discourses’”

Amy Cuddy, “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are.”

What is Discourse?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEB4rAZanpM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5-hvJX1iUs
https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word/transcript?language=en
http://lucchesi-sp13.wikidot.com/james-paul-gee-literacy-discourse-and-linguistics-introducti#:~:text=Literacy%2C%20Gee%20defines%2C%20is%20the,literates%20affect%20people%20and%20society.&text=Primary%20discourses%20cannot%20verbalize%20the%20use%20of%20meta%2Dknowledge.
http://lucchesi-sp13.wikidot.com/john-swales-the-concept-of-discourse-community
https://www.slideshare.net/rslyons/engl-1023-spr-17-paper-2-gee-powerpoint
https://www.slideshare.net/rslyons/engl-1023-spr-17-paper-2-gee-powerpoint
https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are?language=en#t-680326
https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are?language=en#t-680326