Discourse Community Ethnography Outline

Introduction

• Brief review of the existing literature (published research) on the topic. ("We know X about discourse communities" [cite Swales, Gee, Johns, Mirabelli, and/or Wardle as appropriate"])
• Name a niche ("But we don't know Y" or "No one has looked at X").
• Explain how you will occupy the niche. This is a kind of preview where you say what you're going to discuss, what your study is trying to accomplish. Branick occupies a niche in the following sentence: "To figure this out, I conducted an ethnographic study on how the coaches at the University of Dayton go about reading people and reading the game" (561).
• Preview findings / Thesis (come back to this when you're finished with the whole thing)

A Description of the Discourse Community (similiar to "Lou's Restaurant" on 543 of WAW)

• Use this section to describe this discourse community-but don't start analyzing the community until the results section. You could skip this section and have this information in the intro too. This is a good place to integrate Swales' criteria and how your discourse community fits into that criteria.

Methodology -a description of how you collected and analyzed your data.

• who did you interview? how did you draft interview questions?
• how/ when did you observe? record conversations?
• What texts do you examine and how did you gain access to those texts?
• How did you decide which information to highlight in your results section? and which to leave out? Look back at Mirabelli's "methodology" section on 543 for a good example.

Results

• Discuss your findings in detail and compare them to the relevant research: specific elements or concepts of discourse communities presented in the literature. So if you're discussing authority in your discourse community? What can you add to what Johns has said about authority? If you're analyzing a text, you might include a transcription of that text in this section. Furthermore, this is the place to integrate quotes from your interview.

Implications/Conclusion

• Zoom out. What can we learn about discourse communities in general though your investigation of this specific discourse community? Refer back to your niche or research question/ and tell us what we learn about this specific discourse community overall. What other research might be done on this topic? What were you not able to examine that might be worth examining?