Discourse Community Analysis

“A discourse community is a group of people who share similar goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals” (Swales 220). Discourse Communities are thought to have six characteristics according to John Swales in his excerpt “The Concept of a Discourse Community.” Swales stated that “These characteristics being the community has a set of common goals known to the public, mechanisms for communication, mechanisms to provide feedback, has one or more genres of communication, an acquired specific lexis, and a level of members with relevant expertise to this content” (Swales 221). “Keys to Success” is the name of a learning community for first-year freshmen offered at the University of Memphis. I am a part of this community, of

Krech, she has been teaching within this community a total of six years and has been teaching ACAD for 24 years. I interviewed her to gain her perspective as well as her standing within this discourse community. The first question I asked was How do you communicate with the members in this community? And she said, “We have a weekly schedule of what we will be doing in class each day as well as reminders and emails containing important information about upcoming assignments.” When I asked her to describe the community she had this to say “The three teachers linked together in this community met up in the summer and talked about how our classes can connect with each other. For English, I ensured your instructor that we would do some writing in class that we would do some writing in order to help better improve your writing abilities. As well in anthropology, we organized a plan for me to incorporate some things about culture towards the end of our time in ACAD.” What are your means of communication with the other two teachers in this community? “Generally, we use email because we can easily access that and we could phone each other as well if we had the need” (Krech). The emails between each of the teachers is another genre of communication used between the members with more

The main rule is to come to class because first, you pay all this money for it and second because it’s kind of mandatory. Our professors do not have to provide us with the work we miss if we do not come to class because it is our responsibility as a member of this community to be in class. Whenever a member is late or does not come to class the teacher usually documents it and if they get a certain number of tardies or absences it leads to a conference between the student and the teacher and if this continues then the teacher must report it to the academic board. The work we do is distributed evenly and everyone must complete their own homework assignments for class. Usually, everyone understands their role within this community. Although, there are times when confusion happens upon students or teachers about the class assignments. Most of the confusion comes in my English Composition class due to many of the more complex readings we are required to as college students. As well for my anthropology class there is confusion, but to clear up any concerns we are able to meet up with our professors to express our