The Concept of Discourse Community

A discourse community, as described by John Swales in “The concept of Discourse Community” has six defining characteristics:

1) “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.”

Each discourse community has common purpose or goal that they are trying to achieve; this goal must be know by everyone in the community.  

2) “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.”

   The discourse community has to have a way for its members to communicate with one another.  This communication can include all kinds of communication whether it be formal (i.e. weekly meetings or gatherings) or informal (i.e. emails or newsletters).  For example a sports team may hold a weekly or daily practice and a fraternity will hold a weekly chapter.  While a group of gamers might meet in a more informal way in a game room to play against one another.

3) “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.”

I take this to mean that one must be actively involved in the community in order to be considered a part of the discourse community.  You can say that your apart of a particular discourse community, but if you don’t take part in their means of intercommunication whether it be attending their meetings or reading their newsletters, then you are not truly a part of that community.  You have to know what is going on and stay involved.   

4) “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.”

The genres are texts specific to the discourse community.  These genres create a set of expectations for how the members of the community should interact and communicate with one another.  This must be done before the community can be recognized as a discourse community to others.

5) “In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.”

A discourse community may have its own jargon or technical language that must be understood by all of its members.  For instance on the class blog when it is said to read something in WAW, that isn’t a term used by everyone, people who aren’t in our class who may read that will have no idea what that means. Just as people in the medical profession have technical jargon that they use.   

6) “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expense.”

Membership will inevitably change over time, but the community cannot function and continue without a reasonable number of people who have been involved for a while and know how the organization is run stay involved. For instance a company who didn’t treat their employees well couldn’t function if all of their employees up and quit on the same day.  There would be no one to teach newcomers how the job is done.