We have went over different concepts, audience, rhetorical situation, genre, reflection, discourse community, and knowledge.

Audience- are the people that read what an author has written, the author has control over what, and how he writes to aim to different types of audience.

Rhetorical situation- are caused by an event that has actions to bring significant modifications to the situation. For example a student needs help with an assignment, they would go to the teacher for the help, and that’s a rhetorical situation.

Genre- all the work that is put into specific categories of similar style or form.

Reflection- reflecting over what you first knew and after what you have learned.

Discourse community- is a group of people with the same interest in a subject or share the same knowledge, they have their own words they use, that a person needs to understand in order to be apart of it. The community have guidelines to what makes them a discourse community.

Knowledge- is the information we learn from experiences, that we can be learned by someone with that knowledge or can be found, and discovered to be taught.

For my topic I will be observing a high school classroom that uses the PBL system to see what’s it like to be in a classroom like that, then I will be interviewing high school teachers, that come up with projects that use PBL system to teach it. And finally, I will be surveying high school students, to see what they think of it, and get results about the effectiveness of my topic.

English 1001, professor Murdock 

Research Proposal Assignment: Major assignment #2

Khalid Daraghmeh

Dr.Murdock 

English 1001

Septemper 30/ 2019

1. Your research question

I came up with different questions and worked on to refine one of them and my final research question is “How effective is project base learning?”

1. A working title for your project

1. A summary of your project. Identify your topic and describe what you will be looking at

in terms of the topic. Include some key terms and additional questions that will guide your research. 

I plan to research the topic project base learning and write about the different ways it can be effective and be helpful. After going to my high school I have been curious about project base learning they have always used to teach students, during the last year I took a class that was math and a physics class, this class really showed me what PBL is, we learned a lot in that class and solved real-world problems. This is why I choose it to do my research on.    

1. A description of your purpose for working on this project. Why did you choose this topic? What do you hope to learn from this project?

I love the way that my teachers used PBL to teach at school, so many students loved it. I plan on interviewing some of my high school teachers and students to get a more understanding of the PBL system. Also do more research to find about other stories that are out there, as well as informative articles to teach me more about the topic to help me reach my goal of the essay.   I plan to have teachers and students as my audience. 

1. A discussion of the key challenges you will face or you imagine you will face. What concerns do you have regarding the research/project?

There’s going to be a lot of challenges I am going to face in this project, biggest challenge is time, I don’t think we are given enough time to research and write an essay.  The second challenge for me is to set up times with teachers to interview, also finding really good resources is going to be hard.

This topic is important to me, I always thought the way the teacher teaches the student is very important. There’re so many ways teachers can teach the student, but the right way must be found to get the maximum knowledge into the student’s minds, so they have all the information needed. I couldn’t decide on a single question to use, because I think all are important.

My questions:

• What is the most effective learning process?
• How do you come up with a good learning process?
• How effective is a learning process than another learning process?

My topic: Analysis of learning processes

1. What is the most effective learning process?
2. How do you come up with a good learning process?
3. How effective is a learning process than another learning process?
4. What are the possibilities with a good learning process?

I think knowledge come from learning, going out the comfort zone to find new things that can teach you new things, and make your knowledge grow stronger. Learning new things help shape and reform your knowledge

A discourse community that I consider to be a part of is an after-school clubs that I was a part of, I was a part of robotics club, and cyber warriors, fun fact I was the one to come up with that name for our club. Anyways both clubs had similarities and differences, I have done a lot of work in both clubs and was a very important member of both. I have never thought of them as a discourse community until this day, using the six characteristics that Swales described in his text I define the different experiences I have experienced. Both clubs had different goals that we have set, my robotics we have set a goal to make a functioning robot that can go on a course to fight and win a game, while the other we worked on  a technology based project to present at a very big tech conference that happens ones a year.  

There’s a lot of ways we were communicating with each other’s, we ran a chat server for one of the clubs, while the other had an email list, as well at least one meeting each week.  There so much work going on, we were always there for each other’s to help and learn, of course I had some experience with it, but after I finished, I had a lot more knowledge, because of the experience I had. We had our own words and terms we used, like if I said “raspberry pi” you would think of a delicious pie but that’s a name of a small computer that we used to code projects into to be able to run them. People with this experience would be able to understand those terms, which gets me to my next point going from those small groups to be able to be apart of way bigger communities, for example I got the chance to run as a developer for a big company like Apple to help improve their software.

I once tried to be a part of a French club, I thought I could learn something new about a language with absolutely no experience. After going in I didn’t think I will have fun here or enjoy it as it was really if you wanted to join you had to have some experience with speaking French and I didn’t have that.  It made me feel like I was left out on things and didn’t understand anything that was talked about.

My definition of audience is that the audience can be a large or small variety of persons depending on the genre of literary work. It can be for a more formal audience like a professor or a simpler audience like a group of friends. It can be the people reading an author’s book or listening to an artist song.

  The type of audience that you choose is really import to the text. After watching and reading the different activities, I noticed that both are aimed on people who are trying to fit in, maybe because they are new to a job like in the documentary or a person with a different language like in the text. It is very hard for people like that try to fit in and takes a long time to get along with everyone, meet new people and advance as well succeed.   I think both had unique parts of the text or the documentary that aims at specific audience, like in Anzaldua text they had a text in other languages explaining some but not all, so that piece of text can only be read by the people who knows the language.

Bitzer defined rhetorical situation as “A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.”

My own definition of rhetorical situation are caused by an event that has actions to bring significant modifications to the situation. An example of this would be the town mayor can focus on a traffic policy, that is a big problem, thus causing the mayor to respond with rhetorical discourse concerning this problem.

There is so many different genres out there, they each achieve their purpose and reach each of their own audience. In genres writers use rhetorical situation to convey a message, find audience and get their text into a genre, they use rhetorical appeals to help shape the text to be fit into the chosen genre.

 -Prompt Reflection Review the Major Assignment #2 prompt. What does it ask you to do?

The prompt of major assignment 2 asked us to write a research paper, based on primary research we are going to be doing. And about a topic that we have chosen.

-What are you familiar with in this task, and what is new to you?

I am familiar with doing research but that’s secondary research, primary research is new to me and need to practice it more often.

 -What steps will you need to take to complete the work?

Research, plan to create the paper, brainstorm, and more research.

-How much time will you need to set aside in your schedule to complete the work?

For me personally this a big research paper, and it’s very hard for me especially not having English as my first language, I will be setting a lot of time aside to work on this paper.

-What complications do you anticipate as you reread this prompt?

Some complications I am facing, I am limited to what I can researching, this is a long research paper, and primary research I have zero experience with.

To me, genre is those different categories that put similar content together, but we see it everywhere in music, movies, and of course books and writing, it helps the reader to choose which category to read or watch from to their interest. We all have written pages and pages for an assignment if it’s in high school or college, or even for work. I have written papers on top of papers for my high school classes it really taught me how to become better at writing, I have written different pages for different things and because of that each group of those pages if we break them down, so they fit into genres I could easily find a speech that I wrote or a horror story. The author defined genre as acts that are in patterns, that relate to the text in that genre. My definition has a lot of similarities to the author’s definition we both agreed on the text is similar to others and put in the same category and every genre has its own patterns.

There’s not much difference to the definition we came up in class to the author’s definition, there’s a lot of ways you can explain genre and online you will find a lot of different definitions to it, however doesn’t mean you will find them all to mean the same they will give different ideas to it, it will come down to who wrote the definition and what they thought of it. Both our definition has basically the same meaning, the way we presented it was different and gave two different definitions. What the writer thought of it will matter how it will be presented to the reader, also the reader could understand it in a different way than the writer meant to deliver the definition.