In “Building Tasks” James Gee states that there are many different languages and different varieties of a language and these sign systems are how people within a certain Discourse can communicate, “There are many languages (e.g., Spanish, Russian, English). There are many different varieties of any one language (e.g., the language of lawyers, the language of biologists, and the language of hip-hop artists). These are communicative systems that are not language (e.g., equations, graphs, images). These are all different sign systems.” (Gee 35) As Gee goes on to discuss this idea he elaborates to say that within certain privileges or disciplines there is set of sign systems that everyone within that discipline has the ability to use. For those in the discipline it is very simple and easy to understand to use these sign systems but they usually seem foreign and unfamiliar to those who are on the outside. These types of sign systems are especially prevalent in the scientific fields, they allow for smoother communication between scientists all over the world despite language barriers. The idea of a scientific sign system was also discussed by Nair Nair in ” Organization of a Research Paper: The IMRAD Format”. The IMRAD format that is being discussed in his paper is a form of scientific writing. “These are words by which the paper should be indexed by abstracting services. Words that appear on the title should not be repeated as keywords because titles and keywords are listed together by abstracted services.”(Nair Nair 16) In the IMRAD format scientists use certain keywords that proves their expertise in the subject by the diction or jargon that they use. The words that they use are part of their scientific sign system.
In Gee’s “Building Tasks” he discusses the idea of practices and activities and how these can affect our ability to enter a Discourse. The way you conduct yourself or go about certain things can affect how easily you will be able to enter the Discourse you are trying to join. We see examples of this in Haas’ experiment where she observed a student that was attempting to join the biology Discourse. Haas observed her practices and activities and noticed that as she moved further into the Discourse her preferred practices began to change as she became more knowledgeable about the subject. An example of this would be that as she got further into the Discourse she preferred to read scientific articles rather than textbooks, because the information in the articles was more current and relevant than that in the textbooks.
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