Gee’s Building Tasks for Discourse Analysis

Building Evidence for an Analysis of Science Discourse

Significance

“Disciplinary texts, like all texts, are intensely situated, rife with purpose and motive, anchored in myriad ways to the individuals and the cultures that produce them.” (Haas 44)

This passage reveals that Haas’ believes there is significance in disciplinary texts because they have a purpose and are written for a reason.

 

Practices (activities)

“Include negative data — what was not found — only if useful for interpreting the results” (Nair and Nair 20).

Nair and Nair state an important practice of writing results for a research paper. They stress the importance of including the information that was not found in order to help understand the results.

 

Identities

“Indicate the significance of the results.” (Nair and Nair 21).  

Nair and Nair are explaining that there are two different discourses to research results. They state only to use significant data. Therefore there must also be insignificant data which means there are at least to discourses to data.

 

Relationships

“Authors create texts and readers read texts in a complex of social relationships…” (Haas 44).

In this passage, we see that Haas is explaining that authors create text in order for readers to read the text in the context that the author puts it in.

 

Politics

“At a college level, to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and bahaving toward, texts within a disciplinary field” (Haas 43)

In Haas’ paper she uses information for Bartholomae, berkenkotter, huckin, and Ackerman to describe the importance of being literate. This shows that they all share a similar idea on how to become literate and the importance of it in order to obtain social goods.

 

Connections

“Include negative data — what was not found — only if useful for interpreting the results” (Nair and Nair 20).

This advice reveals the importance of linking data that was found to data that was not found. By doing this it shows a correlation that something didn’t occur because something else did.