John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community"

John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community"

Introduction

A “discourse community” can be defined as the ideas that discourse are used as a tool to understand and apply the knowledge of others in any group, academic or social. As college students, we encounter these groups on a frequent, every day basis. The foundation of college is basically built about discourse communities. Students pay to meet in classrooms or lecture halls everyday and experience the work of discourse communities. We not only constantly experience discourse communities, we experience regular speech communities as students. We all develop a certain “slang” we use to communicate with each other, and we also develop the way we speak to those of authority, such as professors. With any college student, the way they speak to a fellow student would differ extremely to the way they might address a professor. Initiating new members into our groups of knowledge requires us to understand our own knowledge, and then extend it to other students and expose them to that knowledge they did not have before, and for them to return the favour. We form groups depending on common interests or topics, as Swales defines as “genres”. Genres are topics that are used as categories, in order to group certain objects or in this case, people, together. Lexis is defined as stock of words or the way vocabulary is used in a group. Genres and lexis work together to keep the group in a certain order, genres ensure the group and its members stay on topic and that those who are allowed to join the group understand and meet the criteria of the certain genre. Lexis is important to keep the ideas of the genre in its place through vocabulary and choice of words that relate back to the genre (Swales, 1990).

Discussion

In Swales article he identified a set of characteristics that are essential for a discourse community.

Discourse community has roughly settled set of frequent public goals

In other words Swales is saying that each discourse community has a known agenda; that each person in the community is well aware of what the discourse community intends to achieve or do. This agenda could be written or just known. An example in my life would be the discourse community of my soccer team in high school. We had common goals that we all wanted to achieve, winning. This necessarily ...