Investigating discourse communities online

Teaching notes

This task enables students to think about discourse communities with some individual
examples. It is essential for A Level ‘evaluate’ questions and useful for AS ‘discuss’
questions to have examples to refer to and discuss with reference to frameworks and
theory, and these are usually more easily learnt when, to the student, they are
meaningful and familiar examples, rather than gained from a textbook or teacher.

The data collection task can be set as a prep learning or flipped classroom task to
complete ahead of the lesson, along with the questions – both those about the data
source and those about the data. Alternatively, students could simply collect the data
outside the lesson and then complete the questions with support in the classroom. Data
collection and some brief analysis can be set up and demonstrated in the lesson before
by using education-focused Twitter chats or forums such as #teamenglish, #EngLang or
the TES forum.

The group task needs to be completed with other students and can be a paired or group
work. There can be a feedback session before this task, with some findings collected for
brief discussion.

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 Investigating discourse communities online

Discourse community: a group of people linked by a common interest or goal.

People opt into discourse communities, unlike speech communities, which we belong
to from birth due to more fixed aspects of our language.

John Swales’ six criteria for a discourse community:

1. It has a set of goals which are clear and public.

2. It has clear lines of communication between its members (often more than one,
e.g. email and spoken).
3. It mostly uses its means of communication for members to provide each other
with information and feedback.
4. It uses one or more genres of text to help achieve its aims.
5. It has its own lexis.
6. It has a baseline level of members with enough expertise, although members
will come and go.

Milroy’s social network theory:

A dense (or closed) social network is one in which everybody knows everybody else.
A multiplex social network is one in which people share several points of connection.
A dense and multiplex network is able to more easily maintain non-standard
language than an open one.

Data collection task

Collect and print three to five pages of data from an online community that you are a
member of or contribute to/read regularly (you need to be familiar with the language
and context). This could be one of the following:
 Facebook group
 Twitter chat or hashtag
 Whatsapp group
 bulletin board or forum
 Tumblr page.

Investigating your data source

For each group, answer the following questions:
 What is the link between people in your chosen online community? What brings
them together in this group (e.g. interest, sport, hobby, occupation, club
membership, social/religious practice)?
 To what extent is it reasonable to describe your community as a discourse
community? How far does it meet Swales’ definition?
 How many people in this community do you also know in another context (e.g. at
school/college, in a job/club, through family links)? How many links do you have
with people in this community? How would you rate this community for denseness
according to Milroy’s social network theory? Are your links to it multiplex or open?

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 Investigating discourse communities online
Investigating your data

Lexis: Identify words in your data which are not used elsewhere.

Extension question
What processes have been used to form these words (e.g. acronym, blend, affixation)?

Semantics: Which semantic fields are the most apparent in your data? Select three
fields which you feel are important and list the related vocabulary in a table, as below.
Tally how frequently each word (or a variant – e.g. the plural form) appears.

Field 1 Field 2 Field 3

Identify words in your data which have a special meaning in this context but would not
be understood by ‘outsiders’.

Extension question
Do you know the origin of any of these special meanings?

Grammar: Which sentence functions are most common in your data? Tally them in a
table as below:

Declaratives Exclamatory Imperatives Interrogatives

Identify any non-standard grammar use in your data (e.g. unusual syntax,
missing/unusual verb use, non-standard pronouns).
To what extent is this non-standard grammar a feature of your chosen community or is it
more related to the online mode of the communication?

Pragmatics: Identify any turns or conversational moves that you feel rely on your
discourse community’s shared resources to interpret.
Are there any misunderstandings or explanations for new people to the community in
your data?

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 Investigating discourse communities online
Group task

Compare your results with at least one other student. For a broader set of data,
compare in a group of four. Try to have differing communities within your group if
possible.

You should:
 Introduce your data sets to one another (use the questions about your data source
to help you).
 Explain your key findings using the framework-based questions about your data.
 Discuss the extent to which your findings are similar/different for different
communities.
 How far is it possible to talk about ‘the language of discourse communities’ as
opposed to ‘the language of x discourse community’ i.e. a specific community?

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