The only people who go to youth groups are the perfect kids who never do anything wrong and go to church every week and discuss God and what is going on in their life. Many people believe this to be the stereotype but while doing my research I find this to be quite wrong. While there may be those kids within this community they do not represent it as a whole they are just a small part of a larger group. When you look at a group of people you classify them according to how they look, act, or talk. Gee says in order to be recognized as part of a certain community you must “Speak the right way, but you have to act and dress in the right way as well.”(Pg. 440). While people do not realize it all of these factors add up to form discourse communities. Rarely do people take the time to look deeper into those communities to get a better understanding of them.
Christianity began over 2000 years ago with Jesus Christ and disciples. Jesus would travel around the villages preaching religion and teaching people the will of God. Jesus would eventually die for the sins of man but three days later he would be resurrected and gave hope to the world. Jesus became known as the messiah for the Christianity religion as well as the teacher of God. People now continue to tell his stories and worship him today in what is know as Christianity. There are all different kinds of ways people get to get together to worship and praise God and one popular way for teenagers is youth groups because it allows for them to learn about God but in a modern and more fun way.
As I walked into this dark light room filled, and turned the corner I saw a group of teenagers standing up with their hands in the air while singing songs that I had not ever heard before. O...
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...ughout the whole service I never felt out of place or that I was not welcome there. I felt as though I was immediately accepted as one of them and I had become friends with all of them. All different kinds of people attend these you groups and it is not just the “goodie goods” and the “church boys” like people seem to think, they are all just people looking to express their views among their peers. As I first walked through those doors into that dark room with Connor I was a little skeptical of what I was getting myself into but as I walked out I had a whole new outlook on youth groups.
Works Cited
Aitken, Connor, Personal Interview, 12 October 2011
Gee, James P . "Tools of Inquiry and Discourses." Exploring Language. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 440-451. Print.
Kennedy, Philip. Christianity: an Introduction. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011. Print.
Palmer, William. "Rhetorical Analysis." Discovering Arguments: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, Writing, and Style. Boston: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2012. 268-69. Print.
Discourse communities are groups of people with a unique point of view. There are many discourse communities around your everyday life. These communities are part of the entire human environment. Many discourse communities are distinctly large due to all the societies wanting the same things. My discourse communities are mostly Facebook.
Longaker, Mark Garrett, and Jeffrey Walker. Rhetorical Analysis: A Brief Guide for Writers. Glenview: Longman, 2011. Print.
Pause for a second and think about a play or musical that you have seen. Consider the plot, whether you liked it or not and if the experience was positive or negative. Think about the characters, the costumes, and the emotions that were emitted. The discourse community of theatre is unique in the way that it is so complex and there are many different parts that ultimately come together to create a dynamic whole. The term discourse community is rather broad, but John Swales in his article “The Concept of Discourse Community” gives six characteristics that define it. Swales lists them saying,
As put by Jen Waak in regarding the human need for community, “By surrounding yourself with others working toward a similar goal, you’ll get...yourself a bit further than you would have done on your own,” (Waak). By being able to see and participate in these different communities centered around different objectives, the goal becomes easier to achieve and bonds the group into something more through trying to reach it. This new unit is called a discourse community and is defined by John Swales as containing six specific characteristics: having a common goal, showing intercommunication and using lexis, having participation within the group, being defined by genres of texts, and having members with areas of expertise for the community. When looking
Discourse communities play a big role in life and how humans interact in general. A discourse community refers to a group of people who have language, life patterns, culture, and communication in common with each other. The idea of a discourse community has also been used to bring people of different orientations together, like family members, students, or committees. All of these types of people might have different standards of living, like their level of income, education, and work abilities. Discourse community can also refer to a speech community, because the main feature of a discourse community is communication. A discourse community can include groups of different regional areas that may or may not share norms and living patterns
Christianity was first brought about by Jesus, who preached he was the son of God. After Jesus was hung on the cross and then resurrected one of his apostles, Paul, started the church. It first became popular in Jerusalem, and then continued to spread throughout the rest of the Middle-East, eventually reaching ...
To examine various discourses, it is crucial that the idea of discourse and the way in which discourses operate is clear. A discourse is a language, or more precisely, a way of representation and expression. These "ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic produce meaningful knowledge about the subject" (Hall 205). Therefore, the importance of discourses lies in this "meaningful knowledge," which reflects a group’s ideolo...
Christianity is mainly founded on the life, death, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity was developed from Judaism during the 1st century, it has several different branches and forms which accompany different beliefs and practices. Christianity
Life is full of different paths that each person has to take to achieve their goals. In those roads, people might find groups that share ideas, knowledge, culture, or tastes with them, called discourse communities, which can lead to live experiences that might turn unforgettable. People can join an infinite number of these groups, however in order to accomplish that they must convince its members by applying some techniques taught in this class of English 1301, for example, knowing the group’s rhetorical situation, i.e. its cultural context, motivations, the audience itself, etc. or applying the different Aristotelian appeals such as ethos (appeal to credentials and experience), pathos (appeal to emotions) or logos (appeal to facts), to let them know that they have what it takes to be a part of that group. Every human being regardless their age, race, gender or religion can find a discourse community to join, that’s why this wide subject might be interesting to every person in the world, however some readers might object this idea by insisting that some people are unique and can handle themselves alone in life, but no one can live alone, as the famous American writer Pearl S. Buck said “The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration” that means that every human being must find a community to join, just to share with other people and communicate their feelings, because human beings were created to grow as a society not as individuals. In my particular case I joined the discourse community of “Gaitas del Colegio Santiago de Leon de Caracas...
Teens more than anything else feel the desire to belong to a group, this may be with friends, or even clubs. This is why we see things like sports teams, book studies, and pep rally’s. While students may find joy or entertainment from these things, the real reason why they do it is to belong to a group of people that care for one another. In fact the core reason for people to do gang like activities is because of thier desire to belong to a group where they feel accepted. Even people like the jocks and cheerleaders feel this desire and in youth ministry the only thing we can do with this is learn from it and use to it our advantage. In the society that we live in today though, youth groups are towards the bottom of the list often times as cool places to belong to. It’s becoming almost politically incorrect to invite a friend to youth group and sometimes can be seen as offensive to do so. But while these other groups may be easy to become a part of, a healthy a strong youth ministry can provide students wi...
Kiesling, Scott Fabius. "Power and the Language of Men." Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication. Comp. Susan D. Blum. New York, NY [etc.: Oxford UP, 2013. 408-17.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2007.
The people there were all extremely nice and would try to help me understand. They understood and accepted the fact that I wasn’t religious, but was showing interest in their faith. There were not as much people there as I had expected, but that might have been because it was a smaller church. It also wasn’t as racially diverse as I had expected. I thought that because it is the world’s biggest religion, that it
North, S. (2012), 'English a Linguistic Toolkit' (U214, Worlds of English), Milton Keynes, The Open University.