Discourse Community Analysis: Basketball
The Height of Discourse After I watched two hours of intense play and the huddle split, I observed high fives and complex handshakes of some sort. “Hampton on three. Hampton on three. ONE, TWO, THREE, HAMPTON!” They started coming my way; as an ex-basketball player, deep down I yearned for a handshake or some kind of acknowledgment, but I sat there like a fork in the road. Each member parted around me to my left and to my right, some giving head nods and some giving nothing at all. I quickly realized that I was clearly not a part of this discourse community.
One rainy evening, I sat in my house bored as all ever and realized that I had an assignment to observe and analyze a discourse community. So I walked over to Holland Hall and sat through a whole Hampton University Men’s basketball practice. I sat on the bleachers trying to be as invisible as possible, mainly because I felt like somewhat of an imposter. An imposter is ( DEFINE IMPOSTER!) and that is exactly what I was doing. The Hampton University Basketball team is one of the most popular sports currently on campus. With fifteen active members on the team out of a whopping 4,567 undergraduate students attending school, this is an extremely small population and discourse community. But how do we know that it is a discourse community? Throughout this paper I will prove this statement, by analyzing the presence of a common language, a means of a common language, a threshold for membership, a means of identifying who’s in, a common belief, and common behaviors.
This basketball team is made up from a variety of different people; ranging from short to tall, lazy to hardworking, and originally from different areas across the states. Hampton Men’s basketball is A Division 1 team which is currently a part of the Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference (MEAC) along with ten other universities. They recently in 2011 went to the NCAA tournament where they were eliminated to arguably the best powerhouse in college
One rainy evening, I sat in my house bored as all ever and realized that I had an assignment to observe and analyze a discourse community. So I walked over to Holland Hall and sat through a whole Hampton University Men’s basketball practice. I sat on the bleachers trying to be as invisible as possible, mainly because I felt like somewhat of an imposter. An imposter is ( DEFINE IMPOSTER!) and that is exactly what I was doing. The Hampton University Basketball team is one of the most popular sports currently on campus. With fifteen active members on the team out of a whopping 4,567 undergraduate students attending school, this is an extremely small population and discourse community. But how do we know that it is a discourse community? Throughout this paper I will prove this statement, by analyzing the presence of a common language, a means of a common language, a threshold for membership, a means of identifying who’s in, a common belief, and common behaviors.
This basketball team is made up from a variety of different people; ranging from short to tall, lazy to hardworking, and originally from different areas across the states. Hampton Men’s basketball is A Division 1 team which is currently a part of the Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference (MEAC) along with ten other universities. They recently in 2011 went to the NCAA tournament where they were eliminated to arguably the best powerhouse in college
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