Second, they offer students responses to their work, from classmates as well as the teacher. Third, they encourage students to be critical readers, benefiting from multiple perspectives on texts. Fourth, they establish the notions that collaborative work is normal and that students are capable of offering one another good advice. Students need to develop confidence in their ability to judge good writing and to depend a little less on their instructor to tell them what they have done right or wrong. Establishing a workshop environment allows students to become members of their own communities in the classroom, engaged in the social act of sharing writing and ideas about writing.
Activities reinforce the concepts of collaborative communities and writing as a social act.
Perhaps the fundamental questions common to any discussion of discourse communities are how each community uses written conventions to help define itself and what constitutes appeal and credibility within the group. Encouraging students to explore these and related questions on their own and with their peers is crucial to the success of the course. Each assignment in English 11 follows a whole-language approach, beginning with planning and research. Whether collecting data through field work, interviews, or memory, students must investigate how language defines a particular community, how its members communicate with one another in writing, how writing generates concepts for understanding human experience, and how it sometimes results in community action. Part of their research should involve collecting relevant samples of writing that the community has produced.