The Trust of a Discourse Community
How do groups of people in our society all interact with each other? There are so many different ways people communicate, whether by writing, speaking, or even educating. As John Swales, James Paul Gee, and James E. Porter express, it all has to do with the concept and involvement of a discourse community. The process of common goals and purposes being constructed with the knowledge gathered in a discourse community and expanded by literacy, linguistics, and experience. The authors, Swales, Gee, and Porter, all emphasize key characteristics that they believe best describe a discourse community. Yet, their characterization leaves behind a controversy on both legitimate control and trust a discourse community
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Swales, Gee and Porter all give their understanding of how they believe a discourse community operates and contributes to society. It can be seen as a type of language used to connect between particular groups and integrate social identities into the world (Gee 484). The building of a discourse community starts with creating a type of communication plan. It is necessary that all members connect and confer alike in order to maintain a set of documented decisions and actions. A discourse community connects people to a lifestyle and provides a form of order that stretches the interconnections of words, writings, values, attitudes, and beliefs (Swales 220). Those interconnecting contacts though sometimes conflict with select purposes of other discourses, leading to confusion or even anarchy. When this occurs, awareness and a choice of acceptance or doubt sets into place (Porter 400). For a discourse community to continue all doubt and awareness have to be tracked and suppressed. The discourse community needs to insure that its values are well convinced and received by its members and potential new members, in order to remain accepted in a …show more content…
Handling the problem of mushfaking and spies, the discourse community has to keep tabs on everything going on around and make sure all members are act appropriately. This can lead to forms of judgment and rapid insight being placed on the members behind locked doors. This can cause a disconnect between what the members know and what they do. Gee expands on how being in a discourse means actively complying with all of their values (490). The idea of all or nothing, that if a member is not fully involved then the member is not part of the discourse. Swales brings up this idea with his six criteria, in which if all six characteristics are not implemented into the discourse community then the group is not an authentic discourse (222). The Initiation of members is hard because a discourse has to look out for spies. They look for how strongly a member is willing to cooperate and how much they want to connect with the group. People choose to join a discourse community but a discourse will choose the people based off their true collective ideas and true intentions. The act of mushfaking keeps a member from being all connected to the group, thus keeps them from contributing to common goals or values the community
Discourse Communities are defined as “a group of individuals bound by a common goal who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated” (Couzelis et al. 12). Every person on this planet belongs to a discourse community whether they realize it or not. If you start at a larger scale, Texas A&M University-Commerce is a large discourse community, and within that larger discourse community there are hundreds, quite possibly thousands of smaller discourse communities. Many of the discourse communities overlap with members belonging to several communities at the same time.
Discourse communities are groups of people with a unique point of view. There are many discourse communities around your everyday life. These communities are part of the entire human environment. Many discourse communities are distinctly large due to all the societies wanting the same things. My discourse communities are mostly Facebook.
A basketball team is a great example of a discourse community. In a discourse community you have a few characteristics such as the goals, lexis and genre of the team. Goals are the team’s main focus/points that they want to achieve. Genre is basically how the members of the team stay connected and in contact with each other. Lexis can be described as the language and terminology used between the team members.
“A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory
John Swales theorizes that discourse communities must meet six elements of shared criteria: commons goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, have highly specialized terminology, and members who possess a general level of expertise. For the purpose of this paper, I will analyze three of these components and observe how they function within the CPhT community. My analysis will emphasize the unique lexis that is necessary to function as a member of this community. Methodology: Insider Access and an Interview over a Plate of Kibbi.
Looking for an activity that is is fast-paced, aggressive, and competitive? There is a discourse community that perfectly fits this description. These communities are a defined as a group filled with individuals who share a main interest, idea, and goal. Each discourse community has its own set of intercommunication, lexis, genre, and hierarchy within the members. This year, I was lucky enough to join the Women’s Water Polo Club at Purdue. When I first joined the organization, I felt as if it was going to be difficult to fit it into my busy work schedule, but I was wrong. With school work and other priorities that come with the college lifestyle, the Women’s Water Polo Club works hard to win as many games as possible with the implementation of daily practices, team meetings, and many versions of communication. The team is welcoming of new members, whether they be novices or previous players, and encourages other students to join the organization through social media and campus advertisements. Overall, this active club allows a group of athletic females to bond with one another in order to achieve the main goal of being a successful water polo team.
When a person is asked what he or she knows about discourse community, they might not have any idea of what that means. However, they are probably involved in more than one discourse community. Discourse community in a general definition means that a number of people who have the same interests, values, concerns, or goals. The discourse community term spanned to include everything from religions and morals to sports and games. In all these various kinds of discourse communities, there are some common fundamental forms of communication that participate in keeping these groups related like written regulations, requirements, instructions, and schedules. Being a
As put by Jen Waak in regarding the human need for community, “By surrounding yourself with others working toward a similar goal, you’ll get...yourself a bit further than you would have done on your own,” (Waak). By being able to see and participate in these different communities centered around different objectives, the goal becomes easier to achieve and bonds the group into something more through trying to reach it. This new unit is called a discourse community and is defined by John Swales as containing six specific characteristics: having a common goal, showing intercommunication and using lexis, having participation within the group, being defined by genres of texts, and having members with areas of expertise for the community. When looking
This is essentially reinforcing the second characteristic as well as stating that a discourse community should provide information and feedback through its means of communication. Sticking with the basketball team example, information and feedback would be given to the players, to critique them. They may have meetings with their whole team or separately with the coach. They’re given constructive criticism by their players and coaches for the betterment of the team.
Football is a discourse community I am involved in where the members have similar goals and expectations. As in, what Swales describes a discourse community as groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals”. In his article “The Concept of Discourse Community” (Swales 466-479) Swales argues for a fresh conceptualization of discourse community, especially as a distinct entity from the similar sociolinguistic concept of speech community, and building upon the foundations of that argument defines discourse community in his own. In the Conceptualization of Discourse Community he talks about the six defining characteristics of a discourse community. The discourse community I am part of is playing and coaching football.
To examine various discourses, it is crucial that the idea of discourse and the way in which discourses operate is clear. A discourse is a language, or more precisely, a way of representation and expression. These "ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic produce meaningful knowledge about the subject" (Hall 205). Therefore, the importance of discourses lies in this "meaningful knowledge," which reflects a group’s ideolo...
Community is like a Venn diagram. It is all about relations between a finite group of people or things. People have their own circles and, sometimes, these circles overlap one another. These interceptions are interests, common attitudes and goals that we share together. These interceptions bond us together as a community, as a Venn diagram. A good community needs good communication where people speak and listen to each other openly and honestly. It needs ti...
Forms of discourse: a set of preferred forms of discourse serves as banners or symbol of membership and
Discourse analysis can simply be referred to as linguistic analysis. The term "Discourse" points a finger to a focus of study in the field of social sciences and humanities. In this regard, it should be noted here that the origin of the word is related to the Latin word “Discursus”, which means dialog or conversation. In linguistics, however, discourse refers to an element of language that is longer than a single sentence (Burchill). Discourse analysis is the study of how words are used in any context of communication, whether it be written, verbal, or signs. Discourse analysis examines larger bits of a linguistic piece rather than analyzing the parts of words or sounds. This paper will be discussing the different aspects of discourse analysis,
Because it is so difficult to define what a speech community is precisely, I’m not sure exactly how many specific speech communities I belong to. There may be speech communities within my speech communities that I’m not even aware of, or speech communities that overlap. In this essay, I will discuss one particular speech community and one of its sub-communities.