Linguist John Swales defines discourse community as groups that have common goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve those goals. For students of writing, the concept of discourse community is an important distinction that would help them to better identify their audience, context, communicative methods, and goals. Today, my students got out of the classroom … Continue reading Exploring Discourse Communities: A First-Year Writing Exercise

Many writers and producers are often confused about the differences between a multimedia project and multimodal product. To put it simply, both words share the prefix “multi-”, which means “more than one.” On the one hand, the word “media” – a plural of medium – refers to the technology that is used to produce the … Continue reading Multimedia vs. Multimodal: A Matter of Terms

In this presentation, my students and I share about our learning experience with The HUMN Project, a semester-long ethnographic literacy narrative project designed to provide an opportunity for students to think about their literacy practices and those of others, and to consider issues surrounding literacy acquisition. Presentation materials: Presentation deck (pdf) Handout (pdf) The HUMN … Continue reading Re-envisioning the Research Project: The HUMN Project @ 2015 FYW Symposium