ENGL 505B

I find that my students are still struggling with the idea of context. I think one thing that is confusing is that the book seems to talk about context in two different ways. One is the context of the reception of the message, like a classroom, business meeting, or sitting and reading. The other is context as the greater social and political environment of the message. I used the idea from the CDA teacher's manual that looks at the design of Yahoo's and Google's search engines, and how they conceptualize the context of the internet and their audiences differently.