Blogpost #2 - Your Discourse Communities

My most significant discourse community is the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement (VEYM) in the USA. In my case, my VEYM, which has about 30 the youth leaders (ages 18 and above) and 150 youths/students (ages 6 to 18), is located in Honolulu, Hawaii where I spent the past six years. I have not joined the VEYM in Savannah and not planned to because I want to focus on school.

“The Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement is a non-profit organization, under the leadership of the Catholic Church” (About Us). We would meet once a week on Sundays to have one-hour youth leaders’ meeting. During these meetings, we discuss everything that is going on within our VEYM such as plans for Easter egg hunt, Christmas play, Halloween’s hunted house, Lunar New Year, camps, outdoor activities; sharing lesson plans; discuss class issues and so on. Then we teach the kids two classes: Bible and Vietnamese language classes; each lasts an hour. The day ends with mass in church.

First thing that makes my VEYM a discourse community is that we share a common and specified goal which is to help our kids not only “be virtuous people and good Christians,” but also keep their Vietnamese root (About Us). Throughout the weekdays, we mostly communicate through emails to share and discuss information, plans, meetings’ minutes and so on. We also have a Facebook page where we post pictures of our activities through the year, have open discussion, and communicate with others VEYM at other states which make up one big discourse community, the VEYM in the USA.

Works Cited

"About Us." The Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement in The USA (n.d.). http://www.tntt.org/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=ABUS&Store_Code=TNTT.

Blogpost #1: Portrait of a Reseacher

Name: Uyen Nguyen Hill

ENGL 1102-25

Due Date: 8/25/2014

Portrait of a Researcher

            My first strength in doing anything is the interest in doing it. I appreciate the power of research and do it delightedly. Researching my favorite topics does not only impart me with interesting information, but also makes me feel like the world, let alone the universe out there is so unlimited and I could never discover it all. Secondly, being tech savvy is certainly a plus for me; as this will help me find something quicker, get access to private sources, and go further to discover more materials. Lastly, knowing how to filter and select useful information to put them to best use is definitely beneficial.

My number one weakness is English as my second language. I read everything slower for sometimes I take time to look up the meaning of a word. Beyond the meaning of words is the figure of speech, a word itself means one thing but together, a phrase could mean something absolutely different. Not being born and raised in American leads to another fairly related weakness. I definitely lack knowledge of many previous events in the economy, show business, politics and so on.

I have conducted various research papers. Academic research varies for many different classes such as History, Government, Business, Math, Psychology, Biology, and so on. Personal research includes pre-travelling research which includes hotels, airlines and plane tickets, car rental, destination’s characteristics such as geography, local traffic… and things to do at the destination. Everyday life events also entail personal research such as what restaurants to dine at, how to cook corn chowder or how to decorate a Christmas tree, and the like.

            With the current event involving the young, late Michael Brown and the police force, I would like to do research on how the police was trained to react to such situations, what they could have done differently, and associated events that happened in the past. On a categorically different topic, I would like to know more about divorcing matters such as what is the divorce rate and divorce reasons, how the U.S. compares to other countries in this matter, and what we could do to improve American marriages.