- 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?
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
