Coaches can read, too

Establishing a territory

He begins explaining how important it is to be a football coach. he states that it doesnt matter what kind of football either; peewee to the NFL. He talks about what it takes to be a successful coach and what characteristics a coach needs to coach effectively.

Establishing a niche

He talks about what kink of skills a coach needs to coach a team effectively. what a coach needs in order to teach the team how to win their games.

Occupying the niche

for this he talks about how to put all the information that coaches have to good use. how a coach must read the other team and be able to tell their team what to do to effectively play against the opposing team. he must be able to call the plays so that the team can win.

Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers

It looks like Mirabelli's research question is something about the language that is used to communicate in diners, not only verbally but also written. he wanted to find out more about this language and specifically how it is used within the diner, both between the workers and between a worker and a customer. this is found in the literacy and contemporary theory section of the article.

the data that Mirabelli collected was "direct participation, observation, field notes, documents, interviews, tape recordings, and transcriptions"

He found that it is a lot more complicated than people think to be a waitress. it takes about 10 years to become an expert at it which is the same amount of time that it takes to become an expert at anything. He found that there is a different language that waitresses and people in restaurants use including the use of a menu, which is pretty much exclusive to restaurants.

Discourse Community Proposal

The discourse community that I will be examining is Camp Akita in Logan, Ohio. I began attending the camp the summer before 6^th grade and was a camper every summer through high school. Starting the summer before my sophomore year I began a program called L.I.F.E. Guard where I volunteered at the camp for two weeks every summer for four summers. The summer before my sophomore and junior years of college I worked at the camp as a counselor. And starting this past April I began working in the kitchen. Through out these years I went to many fall and spring retreats and volunteered in the non-summer months to help keep the camp beautiful.

Because of the fact that I have attended or worked just about every job available at this location I think that I know a lot about this discourse community. I am a member of this community and have been since 6th grade. The very first time I ever went to Akita was in 3^rd grade but I don’t think I joined the community at that time. Not only am I a member of this community as a whole, but I believe that I am a member of various smaller communities within the camp so I will be trying to explore a little bit of each of those communities.

I just want to learn more about how discourse communities operate and communicate. The concept of looking at a group as a discourse community is new to me so I think I will learn a lot from looking at something that I have known for so long in a new way.

I plan on citing Gee’s and Wardle’s articles in my paper as well as probably using ‘Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers’. I haven’t read the latter yet but believe that it will apply to my paper because I am going to interview one person from the kitchen at Camp Akita.

Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice

in the introduction both Swales and Gee give their viewpoints on what a discourse community is. Swales is a lot more lenient on what it means to be a part of a discourse community. he says that someone can be involved with a discourse community but not necessarily be a member of that community. Gee is pretty much the opposite. he says that someone cannot float between groups. and if they do they are mushfakes.

Johns talks about how people are born into some discourse communities and they have the ability to chose others that they would like to be a part of. she also says that discourse communities shouldnt really be called that but instead be called communities of practice.

Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

He is talking about how we must be able to do certain tasks or have certain skills before we are allowed to move up to the next "level" in learning a discourse.

In my high school language classes (French) we had 4 areas of learning. Reading, writing, speaking and listening. we had to keep a B or better in each of these areas in order to not only pass the class but also be able to go on to the next level. if you did not keep your grade up to that level you were required to retake the class.

The Future of LIteracy

I think that i most relate to Brittney Moraski. Just like her family, i grew up knowing that education had an unspoken importance. I knew from a very young age that i was expected to go to college. her parents reading choices are very similar to my parents. my mom would always be reading novels and my dad read magazines and the newspaper every day. just like Brittney i relied on friends for my access to a computer. although we had computers at school, i spent the most time on computers at my friend Jessie's house or at the library. We did not get a computer at home until i was in high school. by the time we got a computer at home i was very literate. i used our home computer but knew enough at that point in my life that i didnt really learn much more from our personal computer.

Literacy Sponsors

My biggest literacy sponsors are my family and school.

My family has always been very into reading and everything that goes along with it. my mother began reading to me when i was a baby and read to me until i was able to read to her. She believed that it was very important to be able to read. School has obviously been a big sponsor. I remember in kindergarten, my teacher would read to the class but also read one on one with us. it was always very exciting to be able to have that one on one reading time with my teacher and i always felt very proud of myself that i could read to her. she did an amazing job of encouraging me to read and gave praise out often when i read well. both my family and school gave me academic literacy.

i think that the access that these two groups provided was more than adequate. because of these two groups i now enjoy reading everything i can get my hands on.

i cant really think of any literacy that i was denied. i think my parents did an amazing job of exposing me to different literacy and experiences. my school was very liberal and they were amazing at teaching me about different people and cultures and to that point literacy.