Workplace Literacy (Beaufort)

Written communication, in the workplace setting examined here, is both a call for action and action itself. Written text works for the common good rather than individual accomplishment and is shaped by internal and external discourse communities. (171)

To find:

Geisler, C. (1994). Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

...as Geisler (1994) states "[t]hose concerned with schooling often lack an understanding of mature practice, and it becomes all too easy for K-12 educators to think of the analytic essay as a final achievement rather than a special genre of schooled literacy" (p. 243). I would extend her observation to postsecondary educators as well. (p. 172)

Discourse community knowledge is the knowledge domain within which the other four areas are subsumed. The data suggest that a fully articulated notion of discourse community has considerable explanatory power: To understand discourse community knowledge is to understand how the community's communicative practices—including communication channels, norms for genres, and writers' roles—all flow from long-term overarching goals and values. Unlike rhetorical knowledge, which focuses on the immediate task and a specific audience, such as writing a letter on the occasion of a Chinese association's anniversary, discourse community knowledge illuminates the larger institutional issue at stake in the communicative event: to pay respect to a cultural tradition and a long-term business relationship. (p. 173)

Without a notion of discourse community as used in this study, it would have been difficult to explain a number of phenomena observed: hierarchical treatment of texts; gradations of expertise in relation to writing roles; the interrelationship of oral and written discourse and of silence rather than communication on some topics; the practical and symbolic purposes of texts; the differentiations in form, function, and features of the same genre as used in different communities of practice; or the long-term overarching purposes that various forms of communication served beyond the immediate rhetorical situation. (p. 173)

To come to a full understanding of a discourse community requires awareness that is part anthropological, part sociological, part linguistic, and part psychological. (p. 173)

Genre knowledge, the third knowledge domain, at once constituting both textual and social dimensions, was operationalized here as distinct from, yet integrally connected with, discourse community knowledge and subject matter knowledge. The cases in this report demonstrate that expert use of genre knowledge requires the writer to understand not just the genre's pragmatic purpose, content, structure, and linguistic features, but also how these elements combine in a single text. In addition, the writer must have a deep-level understanding of ways in which the genre's formal features are determined by its role in a given discourse community. Not unfil graduate school did Pam and Birgitte see the ways in which genres specific to academic disciplines actually furthered the work of those disciplines. In the workplace, Selma and Pam were successful in writing grant proposals to city agencies after contact with those discourse communities; as Freedman and Medway (1994b) state, "Achieving an effective text involves innumerable local decisions for which decontextualized, formal rules will provide no guidance" (p. 11). (p. 174)

In fact, I argue elsewhere that teaching conscious awareness of the writing process, teaching multiple genres, and teaching the concept of "reading" a social context for its communicative norms are both feasible and appropriate (Beaufort, 1998). (p. 180)

In:

Beaufort, A. (1998) Transferring writing knowledge to the workplace: Are we on track? In M.S. Garay & S.A. Bernhardt (Eds.) Expanding literacies: English teaching and the new workplace (pp. 179-199). Albany: SUNY Press.

See table 7.1 Comparison of School and Workplace Discourse Communities (p. 184).