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last.updated 9.22.13

Peer Review: Discourse Community Analysis

Purpose

From today's lesson you will learn how to conduct a peer review so that you are providing your peers with feeedback that they can use to reconsider their approach to a text. These are strategies that will be useful in many jobs.

Freewrite: Modeling Peer Review

The following text is a blog response to the DePew article you will be reading for next week. It's composition is guided by the instructions for the Research Blog Entries. Read through the instructions and then the entry; develop a list of the things you thought this writer did well, especially in terms of fulfilling the instructions, and what you think the writer may want to revise before s/he submits this work. You will have 20 minutes.

The author, Depew, argues about multilingual students and Facebook. He goes on to talk about how there is bias against multilingual students and this is why they end up in developmental writing classes. This does not make sense because if they cannot write correctly shouldn’t they be in these classes? He then explains how he did the research, he asked students to talk to him about their Facebook pages while he asked them questions. This is similar to the way someone else named DeWitt did a study on gays, lesbians, and bi-sexuals. He then describes what he learned from the three case studies. In one study about Bakul he talks about how she does not like Facebook because it creates so much drama in her life. Also, even though Bakul likes to put pictures of herself in ethnic clothes on her sight, she is disappointed that others think that it is weird. Another student, Dhanesh, is a bit of a joker; he likes to use his Facebook page to make people laugh. He puts up funny pictures and swears a lot. But he does not care what his audience thinks, if they want to hate on him, he’ll just unfriend them. He is concerned about his grammar when he writes on Facebook and for his classes. The last person, Victoria, also is concerned about her grammar and does not like it when her friends are always correcting it. With her family she uses Spanish in her posts. She likes using Facebook because it helps her connect with her family who are in different places in the world. Ultimately DePew thinks what these students are doing has value. He thinks that some of their decisions show that they are smart, and some decisions are flippant. He wants teachers to think about how they can use their students’ good decisions to be better writers not just about grammar, but about other rhetorical aspects.

I really did not understand terms like rhetoric, flippant, and periphery. I also wondered why he used the term multilingual and not the term I have heard, ESL. Finally I am confused why one would want to use Facebook language in a class, isn’t that stupid language? Wouldn’t that be dumbing things down? Isn’t it the teacher’s job to teach us how to write correctly?

Using your freewrite, we will discuss some good strategies for writing a peer review.

Activity I: Peer Reviewing the Discourse Community Analysis

You will be asked to exchange a draft of your Discourse Community Analysis with one or two other students in the class. Read through your peer's draft and make notes about what you think the writer has done well (again, especially in terms of the assignment description) and what you think your peer would benefit from thinking more about.

Write a 300-500 word email addressed to the writer and cc'ed to the instructor (kdepew@odu.edu) in which you explain your experience with her/his text–what you liked and why you liked it, as well as what you think s/he should revise and why. Point to specific passages to help your audience locate what you are talking about and to also see the point you are trying to make. Please do not write on your peer's text. You will have 30 minutes.