First year City Tech students will learn about “discourse communities” in their English classes. Most of you will be asked to find a discourse community and describe it for required assignments. But what if you never heard of discourse communities before? You are not alone! I didn’t know anything about them either, but I’ve been reading up. I’m going to share some information and tips in this blog post that I hope might be helpful to students working on their discourse community assignments.
Your professor probably shared the definition of a discourse community developed by John Swales. According to Swales, a discourse community:
- Has a broadly agreed-upon set of common public goals
- Has mechanisms of intercommunication among members
- Uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback
- Uses one or more genres to communicate
- Has acquired a specific lexis (terminology)
- Has a threshold level of member knowledge and communication proficiency
Personally, I find some of these words confusing. What does Swales mean by “participatory mechanisms” or “genre” or “lexis”? A definition of discourse community that makes more sense to me is “a group whose members share common values and assumptions, as well as common ways of communicating about shared goals.” In other words, it is a group of people who have the same goals, and who communicate with each other in certain ways to work on those goals.
Bird-watchers, yoga instructors, motorcyle clubs, and drag performers are all examples of groups that share goals and communicate about those goals: to identify birds, to teach yoga, to ride motorcycles, and to perform drag. Each group will have its own ways (mechanisms) of communicating to its members, like in-person meetings or phone calls or online chats. And each group will produce text in one or more forms (genres) like reports, lists, meeting minutes, letters, and so on.
Every discourse community also has its own rules about what can be said and how it can be said. If you want to join a discourse community, you need to learn their rules. You will also need to learn their lingo (lexis) and their expectations around communication. Who will teach you? Those in the group who are “old timers” with a lot of experience and expertise. Without “experts” to guide beginners, the discourse community would fail. But it would also fail without beginners, because without them, the community has no future.
Your professor will likely as you to chose a discourse community to learn and write about. But once you’ve chosen your discourse community, what next? Here are some questions that might help you get started:
- Who are the members of this discourse community?
- What are this group’s goals?
- What are the ways this group communicate with each other?
- How does this group communicate with the outside world?
- What is the “language” they use within their group?
- What does a person need to know before they can join this group?
- Is there a way to tell if a member is a “full” member of the group? What is it?
Next, look for some primary sources, which are any kind of communication produced by the discourse community. Looking at these will help you to understand how people in the community share information.
While most information is intended for existing members, every discourse community needs new members. To encourage people to get involved, they might publish information about their accomplishments. This information may be presented in the form of texts, pictures, videos, charts, and other formats. You can use all of these as primary sources.
You could also collect anything members of the community read or write: brochures, newsletters, reports, etc. or even very short things like forms, notes, and text messages. Be sure to ask permission before collecting anything that might be private to the community.
You may want to directly observe your discourse community in action. Watch them while they are engaged in a shared activity. Take detailed field notes: What are they doing? What kinds of things do they say? What do they write? How do you know who is in and who is out of the group?
People can be useful sources of information. Consider interviewing various members of the discourse community about their communication experiences. You may want to record your interview and then transcribe the recording. In your interview, you might ask questions such as, “How long have you been here?” “Why are you involved ?” “How did you learn to write A,B, or C?”
After you have collected your sources, what should you do with them? Your professor will probably ask you to analyze your sources. Analysis is more than simply reporting or summarizing. Analyzing means asking: what is interesting about how your discourse community functions? What surprised you about your community? Did you find something confusing or troubling about their communication practices? Why do you think it is important for others to understand this discourse community?
When writing up your analysis, keep in mind: focus on how a discourse community communicates, not just on describing the group in general; collect examples of texts produced by the community; ask yourself what is interesting about what you have found. Following these tips will hopefully help to you get you going on your discourse community assignment. And don’t forget, librarians love to help! Ask them for help if you get stuck. Good luck!
Much of the information presented here is adapted from this video on Discourse Community Analysis. The video is long, but very helpful!
