Discourse community

Discourse community is something we come across every day. In

order to have a better understanding of this, I observed two discourse
communities. A group in my church called AWANA, and a political
science class. I observed their tendencies, and their communication in
order to answer the question, How does this community communicate
to meet its goals?.
Swales in the concept of a discourse community the excerpt
from his book, Genre Analysis- English in Academic and research
settings starts off by talking about a couple peoples definitions of the
discourse community. He goes on to say that these definitions arent
really enough to describe what a discourse community is, although
they are guidelines. Swales then lists six characteristics of which you
see in a discourse community in order to correctly explain a discourse
community. He says the first characteristic is, A discourse community
has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. (Swales, 471). His
second characteristic is, a discourse community has mechanisms of
intercommunication among its members. (Swales 471). His third
characteristic is, A discourse community uses participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. (Swales,
472). His fourth characteristic is A discourse community utilizes and
hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance
of its aims. (Swales, 472). His fifth characteristic is In addition to

owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific

texts(Swales, 473) , and his sixth and final characteristic is, A
discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable
degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. (Swales, 473). I
use these characteristics, not only to choose my discourse
communities but to be able to observe my discourse communities in
the best manner possible. By knowing all the correct characteristics I
know what to look for and it made the process of identifying examples
a lot easier.
In Mirabellis article, Learning to Serve: The Language and
Literacy of Food Service Workers He talks about an example of a
discourse community, Waiters, or waitresses, and their customer. He
has an inside view to this communication because he was a waiter. He
uses the concept of a discourse community to defend this job, and
what people think about it. People seem to think waiters, and
waitresses are dumb, and they work at a restaurant because they
arent smart enough to do anything else. He explains how there is a
lack of respect for waiters and he uses the concept of a discourse
community to show people how it is harder than you think to serve and
there are certain things that they know that you may not. One of the
concepts he uses are, multiliteracies. The concept of multiliteracies
supplements traditional literacy pedagogy by addressing the
multiplicity of communications channels and the increasing saliency of

cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today(Mirabelli 542). This

helped me by helping me notice some multiliteracies in the discourse
communities I observed.
My first discourse community was Political science class at UTEP.
In this class the discourse is between teacher and students. In this
class, like in most, they have a shared goal, like Swales says this is one
characteristic of a discourse community. Students and teacher want
students to learn about politics and be able to make smart educated
decisions when it comes to real world problems. Normally in a class,
people talk after a teacher asks a question about something in specific.
In this specific class, the teacher expects us to engage him in
conversation about issues in society. He waits for us to tell him about
current events so that he can clear up whatever questions the students
may have. He expects students to inform themselves, not sit and wait
to be informed by the teacher whose job it is to know that stuff. Those
are the participatory mechanisms that swales refers to in his discussion
about a discourse community. They use a couple genres in this class, a
politics book is used, and a power point is occasionally used in this
discourse community. This goes back to his fourth characteristic about
discourse communities. Theses are the genres used in order to get
their goals accomplished.
My second discourse community is a group at my church,
AWANA. AWANA stands for Approved Workmen are not Ashamed.

AWANA could be considered lexis, which is a specialized vocabulary for

a discourse community. AWANA is a group for children of all ages for
teaching children about the Bible and also for them to have a school
like atmosphere before they even have school. The specific one I
observed was a sub category of AWANA names cubbies. Cubbies is
the group tailored specifically to children ages three to five years old.
They have their leaders who are the teachers of the group. The
children get there and they all sit quietly and wait for instructions from
the leader. They then go over the verses they are supposed to learn
with their parents. The main goal of this group is to raise them knowing
what the Bible is all about so that when they get older they can make
their own educated decision about what they believe. Which is a
shared goal. There is lexis in this class, when leader means teacher in
this class and cubbies means the children in this class. Someone who
comes from the outside may not understand what it means when
someone says lets give the cubbies their snacks which is one of the
sentences I heard while sitting in and observing the class. They get a
different snack every time they meet. They meet once a week. The
kids all become good friends. The genres used are a specific book
tailored to their age group and has the verses that need to be
memorized. When they successfully memorize a verse they get
rewards. In some cases they get stickers and they also get a patch for
a little vest they received upon entering AWANA. These are the

methods of communication between little kids and leader. They do

what they are supposed to so they get rewarded. Normally the leader
will talk and then she will engage the children in conversation by
asking question, and incentives like an extra cookie at snack time
pushes them to answer.
The two discourse communities have a couple similarities and
differences. The most prominent difference to me, is the fact that in
the political science class room students are held to a higher standard.
The teacher expects us to know and start the conversation while in
AWANA the age of the children makes it impossible to exact something
like that. Therefore the conversation is started and held by the leader
in AWANA. Another difference in these discourse communities is the
rewards. For example, in the political science class a prize is your
grade. You dont get prizes just for being there. You need to work while
in AWANA you get prizes for participation and they are more short-term
prizes in a class like this. The children get excited and that keeps them
wanting to come back the next week and the next.
This really opened my eyes to the different kinds of discourse
communities. It is not always as straightforward as you think it may be.
The characteristics listed in Swales really helped me identify Discourse
communities. This was of great help. I think this will be helpful in my
next papers because I feel I was able to observe discourse
communities a lot more in depth.