1.31 Practice Discourse Analysis

Today you gave your presentations on the shaggy dog stories and you were great!   I know this is a lot of new language and that Shaggy Dog stories aren't exactly one of the most popular jokes for you = but you did a great job identifying quesitons to ask and then using the "tools" from Gee to analyze how the jokes worked.

Specically, you used Gee's questions as a starting place to identify and analyze:
1)  language choices (for example =>choice of the word "Czechoslovakian" & "friend" in the early parts of the lawyer joke) ,
2) relationships created through language (for example=> connections to Conversations + the role played by Intertextuality)
3)  and the language forms (for example => the punchline as a set of puns,  the story form with beginning set up, middle development/presentation of complicating action, end = concluding/wrapping up).

Thank you for your presentations - and I will be providing some written comments to Blogs 2 & 3 before next class.

Why are we doing this?  As I said in class = the purpose of this assignment was to give you practice doing analysis that pays close attention to discourse (language in use) and that uses particular examples from a piece of language as evidence of what that language does or how it is used.  What you are doing is discourse analysis = and you will use discourse anlaysis to describe relationships in the data you collect for your  research project.  The blog posts with practice data analysis are opportunities for you to get low stakes (meaning not hugely important to your grade) feedback on how well you are doing, and what you can do to improve; that way, you will have some experience & confidence by the time you analyze the data for your research project.

For next class:
Read: Branick (sent to you as an attachment in your kean email => if you can't open it or didn't get the email = write to the course email)

Blog 4:  Do some of your own analysis on the Shaggy Dog stories.  You can dig deeper into the question you started work on with your group, you can apply the questions your group asked to another story, or you can ask another question, or anything else that gives you good practice using Gee's "tools" to analyze language.

Your post should do the following:

1.  state the question about shaggy dog stories your analysis will answer
2.  use Gee's language tools/questions as a way to explore the Discourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, Social Languages - and particular language choices in the story you are analyzing.
3. Specific examples of the language and other features to illustrate the points you make abou t the Dicourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, etc used in the story you are analzying
4. Discussion of any patterns you see
5. A discussion that states what your analysis about shaggy dog stories (how your analysis answers the question you asked). 

Thanks for the good class today - and have a great weekend.