Swales Criteria

1. A discourse community has a broadly

agreed set of common public goals.

2. A discourse community has

mechanisms of intercommunication
among its members.

3. A discourse community uses its

participatory mechanisms primarily to
provide information and feedback.

4. A discourse community utilizes and

hence possesses one or more genres in
the communicative furtherance of its
aims.

5. In addition to owning genres, a

discourse community has acquired a
specific lexis.

How Your Community Fits/Doesnt Fit the

Criteria
- Teach English to students that come to
ELTI at UNCC, NC, USA.
- Teach English with different purposes.
- Help students become proficient in
English and familiar with American
education institution.
- The teachers attend meetings at
midterm to discuss the progress of
their students.
- Email, telephone and mail boxes in the
office are constantly used by all the
teachers to communicate with each
other for diverse reasons.
- Yes. Each level has its own
coordinator. Therefore, all the teachers
of the same level are constantly
communicating information to the
coordinator and the coordinator can
communicate information to the
director if its necessary.
- There are meetings that involve the
directive staff of the program and the
teachers, where they provide
information and feedback.
- The program has students evaluations
at midterm for each class they attend.
- Emails
- Programming forms
- PPW
- Moodle
- Class books
- In class activities
- The community has acquired specific
lexis to teach English as a language to
students that have none, low, medium
or large knowledge of English, such as
grammatical terms and name of the
structures in language.

6. A discourse community has a

threshold level of members with a
suitable degree of relevant content and
discoursal expertise
-

Yes, there are 27 teachers in ELTI.

The teachers must have a masters
degree in some major related to
linguistics or some field related to
language. At least 2 years of
experience teaching ESL. You can
have study abroad experiences but its
not required. (About half of the
teachers do)
The teachers can leave voluntarily,
even when its not the ideal.