Note on discourse communities

1.  John Swales puts forth the idea of discourse communities.
o He has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about how people learn to communicate
in various rhetorical situations (a situation involving a need to communicate, an
audience, and parameters around appropriate ways to communicate).
 How do people learn to join these communities and progress in them?
 A speech community is defined as a community sharing knowledge of rules from the conduct
and interpretation of speech. Such sharing comprises knowledge of at least one form of speech,
and knowledge also of its patterns of use.
o How can we learn to appropriately respond and communicate inn new settings?
o How can we learn the access routes to gain membership and perhaps power in new
communities?
o How can we become experts?
o How can we study the way people enter groups and figure things out through language?
And what does it show about the individual and the groups?
 Six characteristics of a discourse community
1. A common goal that all member in the community work to achieve or similar
characteristics that member are participating in. Sometimes mainly seen sometimes felt.
2. Has a mechanism of intercommunications among its members. How the members of a
group communicate among one another as opposed to other groups.
3. You have to participate in the community to get the information and feedback from the
community.
4. Uses different genres/devices in the community to further the aims of the group.
5. Has their own way of accomplishing a task that is different from other groups. Different
style of communication either actions of language. Lexis a certain way of using language.
6. The threshold level of members with a suitable degree of knowledge ranging from the
novice to the expert. These are then equally balanced so that there is never too little of
one or to much.