Quote 1: ā€œgroups that have goals and purposes, and use communication to achieve their goalsā€

This quote had meaning to me because in  the previous paragraphs the author kept on talking about discourse communities and I got the gist of it and an idea of it but I wasnā€™t so sure about the meaning. However, the fact that he included the meaning of a discourse community was very beneficial because this helped the first few paragraphs make so much more sense to me and helped me better understand the idea Iā€™d a discourse community. 

Quote 2:   ā€œ 1) has a broadly agreed set of common public goals;  
2) has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members;  
3) uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback;  
4) utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims;  
5) In addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis;  
6) has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.ā€

 These defining  characteristics seem very familiar to me, I am part of many groups and organizations that represent discourse communities.  I didnā€™t know that it was a discourse community but it makes so much more sense now that I know the characters itā€™s of a discourse community. 

Three discourse communities I participate in are 

  1. Boys scouts of America:

In this discourse community we work together as a team to help better communities and to help us reach our goals of making the communities we live in a batter place. We build fences, we build benches and we even make basketball courts to help better and make the community a more enjoyable place for children. If you are late to more than three meetings you are out and therefore, everyone manages to be there on time. Boys scouts of America has all of the six defining characteristics which are ā€œ1) has a broadly agreed set of common public goals;  
2) has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members;  
3) uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback;  
4) utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims;  
5) In addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis;  
6) has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.ā€  In following these rules this organization is therefore, considered a discourse community. 

  • Basketball team

I am in a church basketball team, what this is is we are able to compete in a tournament against other churches in New York and New Jersey. We go around playing games and my church represents the  queens area, so if we win then  queens won the match. This basketball team is a discourse community because we all have the same goals and we have set rules and standards.

  • My English class:

This course is also considered a discourse community because we all have the same goal of learning and we are all placed in this class because we want to learn and we need to learn. This class is mandatory and it has its rules set in place. In this class we are given many ways to communicate with each other and with our professor.  We do work and and get an outcome and therefore, this is one of the most important examples of a discourse community.