Proposal

I plan examining the discourse community of a high school soccer team.   I was a member of this discourse community for four great years, but would no longer consider myself a member in the way that I was before.  I still attend a lot of games as a spectator and see many of my old teammates there to watch the game as well.   I know many of the girls who are on the team now; they were some of the same players who used to come to every single one of our games.  The same young girls who would be so excited to get to stand on the sidelines during our games with extra soccer balls to give us whenever one went out of bounds.  Our team motto has always been “one goal, one heart, one team,”   I intent to use this motto to help me in explaining the team dynamic.

I plan to examine this community in greater detail in my final paper and focus on authority, who has it and how they get it.  I will also focus on how the time commitment affects the players.  Which things people have to give up to be a part of the community.  It takes a very big time commitment there are daily practices, team bonding events, and several games throughout the season.   

As far as references go, I plan on using John Swales article, “The Concept of Discourse Community.”   I plan to use this to set up my paper and use the six characteristics of a discourse community to explain why the soccer team example is a discourse community.   I also plan on using James Paul Gee article, “Literacy Discourse, and Linguistics,” to talk about how people fall into dominant and non-dominant discourses and primary and secondary discourses.   I intent to take this a step further and explain how the community has several closely related discourse communities.  For instance the teams’ fans are a big part of the community, but they don’t quite fall into the community.  Instead the fans almost fall into a discourse community of their own that closely shadow the discourse of the team. 

I intend to incorporate Ann Johns article, “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice.”  I will use this to talk about the players cost of affiliation in being a part of the team.  All that must be given up to be a full fledge member of the team and how it affect the players.  Mostly focusing on how during season all other friends take the back-burner to your friends on the team because those are the only people you have time to spend time with.  I would also like to use Wardle’s article, “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,” to talk about how authority works within the community.  There are many different things to consider when figuring out who has authority, whether the player is a freshman or a senior, the level of soccer experience the player has, the players skill set, etc.  I would like to bring many of these up and maybe try to rank this in a hierarchy of the most authority to the least.