• Using direct quotation and or paraphrase, explain the difference between primary and secondary Discourses. What are some examples (e.g. special ways of talking) of your own primary Discourse?                                                                                Primary discourse is the one we first use to make sense of the world and interact with others ex. Growing up environment that shaped us into adulthood. Secondary discourse is us interacting with people places things outside our comfort group, meaning family, meaning our primary socialization group. ex. institutions- school, people you see in public. My primary discourse would have been my brother, sister, mom and dad. I don’t understand “special ways of talking” of my own primary discourse. My primary discourse was my family and dog, don’t know how else to make that “special”
  • Gee divides secondary Discourses into “dominant” and “non-dominant Discourses” (8) and explains that our “mastery” or fluency in any Discourse depends on “the extent to which we are given access” to the institutions associated with them. What for Gee is at stake in our ability to master a dominant secondary Discourse?                                                           Everything is at stake to master dominant secondary discourse. You are molded by things in life that you interact with the most. For example my main secondary discourse growing up was my Elementary school and my hockey team, and Greece because i would go every summer. These places and the people that come with it, helped shaped me into who I’am today. For the vast majority of people a lot is at stake when it comes to mastery of the dominant secondary discourse. I believe people that have trouble mastering secondary discourse have further consequences in life.
  • What factors might influence our access? Find a passage in Gee that explains at least one way that people enter or are barred from entering a Discourse. Quote it, paraphrase or put it into your own words, and give an example of your own to illustrate this idea in action.                                                                                                                                                                  Our parents, where we live, our environment. For example How easily accessible a school is for kids to get involved in sports, friends, feeling of unity can directly impact that kid for the rest of her/his life. A direct quote from Gee that illustrates one way people enter or are barred from a discourse. “dominant groups in a society apply rather constant tests of the fluency of the dominant discourse”
  • Gee correlates several concepts and practices related to learning/speaking a second language to learning and practicing a Discourse. He might seem most like a linguist in these passages, but consider the usefulness of the comparisons. Pick one of his corollaries and explain how it works and what its social consequence for the speaker is.                                         When Gee talks about how discourses can interfere with each other, just like how languages can interfere with each other. For example if an American is talking on the phone with an Indian native and the American can’t understand the other person due to a heavy accent. The social consequence for them, could possibly add to someones pre judgment of someone else. If this is the only experience this particular American ever has with an Indian then it could lead judging someone based on something that has nothing to do with the kind of person someone is. Maybe the American gets frustrated with the Indian native speaker and thats the negative association the American makes of the Indian.
  • At the beginning of the essay, Gee refers to “Literacy Studies” as a new field that situates language studies within “social practices” (5), and in our reading for today, he provides a new definition of literacy as “mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (9). Perhaps the most difficult passage is his claim about literacy’s (or literacies’) liberating potential: literacy becomes “liberating (“powerful”) if it can be used as a ‘meta-language’ (a set of meta-words, meta-values, meta-beliefs) for the critique of other literacies and the way they constitute us as persons and situate us in society. Liberating literacies can reconstitute and resituate us” (9). Try to explain this concept using your own examples from question #4 or examples Gee has provided. Then revisit question #2: what’s at stake for a speaker who does not have access to a dominant secondary Discourse?                                                                                                                                 I think Gee is trying to give another definition of literacy, Meta meaning “combining for.” Gee might be trying to combine certain beliefs or values to coincide with his definition.  What he might mean by Meta language is combining many languages into a form thats recognized universally. Bringing people together maybe. Gee is expressing his own definition of literacy to open up his readers mind to something very different from what they already thought of “literacy” An example of this is when he says “we could define literacy as mastery of or fluent control over secondary discourse” I had no idea that could be a meaning of literacy. Whats at stake for a speaker who doesn’t have access to a dominant secondary speaker? Well this speaker won’t be able to acquire social goods-money, prestige, status, etc. Which in turn will probably have negative effects, I can’t imagine this person having a lot of success in life if they can’t even access a dominant secondary speaker. I think it’d make life very unsatisfying for anyone.
  •    annotated script

A comment I made in the margin of the essay is “tension of discourses” so if I’m flipping through pages I can track this specific paragraph down easily because it’s written in my handwriting on the side of the paragraph.

Another comment I made of the essay is ” whats the difference between a theorem and a definition. To me Gee used these 2 different words in 2 different parts of the essay to define literacy. Also I didn’t know the definition of innocuous  so i put “innocuous?” to remind myself to look up and get an understanding of the word