Gee’s Building Tasks for Discourse Analysis

Building Evidence for an Analysis of Science Discourse

 

For each of these seven building tasks, Cripps has modeled one example of a passage and brief explanation. Find your own quotes and do your own explaining.  You are not required/expected to have an example in each of the seven building tasks.

 

Significance

“ The educational task of helping students recognize the human nature of scientific activity and the rhetorical nature of scientific texts may be a part of a larger problem in academic literacy for students”

This passage reveals the significance of the problem in the education system with students understanding the text.  

 

Practices (activities)

“Elements of the rhetorical frame include participants, their relationships and motives, and several layers of context”

Hass writes about the rhetorical frame to help read more into the text. This practice helps students understand the whole scheme of the text and understanding the why and how.

 

Identities

“By her senior year, she often viewed texts as multiply connected – to authors and scientists, to other readers, and to historical circumstances – and even demonstrated some understanding of her own connections both to scientific texts and to the objects of her own research”

Hass is explaining how Eliza had changed over the courses of the four years in her reading abilities. She adapted the ‘identity’ of rhetorical reading and proves it in this quote.

 

Relationships

 

Politics

 

Connections

 

Sign Systems & Knowledge

 

ENG110J