Three lists of Discourse Community
According to Linguist John Swales, discourse community is defined as “Groups that have goals and purposes, and use communication to achieve their goals.”
Below are the three lists of discourse communities I participate.
- United State Army
- Engineering club
- Church
Description of The United States Army: The United States Army is one of the oldest and largest branches of the United States Military. According to Wikipedia, It was founded about 246 years ago.
The values of the United States Army are as follows: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless-service, Honor, Integrity, Personal Courage. These values make this discourse community the highly reputable and trustworthy organization in the world.
Communication in the United States Army is carried out through a format we call the chain of command. This structure of communication is set out to ease the workload on the leadership personnel. Like in the civilian community of employment, an employee will report to their supervisor, then the supervisor report to the manager, and the manager to the company’s owner. The same principle of communication applies to the United States Army. We carry out assumptions to help us be distinct in the way of operations.
Description of Engineering Club: According to Wikipedia, Engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. In this discourse community, our primary goals and objective are to figure out how things work and find practical or domestic uses for scientific discoveries.
The values of the engineering discourse community are the Pursuit of greatness is a virtue, being rigorous and persistent, active and supportive, diversity and inclusiveness, mentoring, and professional and personal growth.
We communicate by speaking to each other verbally or writing ideas. Mostly, we use the non-verbal approach in passing a message across through the use of the experimental procedure. We generally carry out assumptions to help us to brainstorm effectively.
Description of Church: A church is a place where people come together to worship under and the idea of praising God. The general assumption of every member of this community is that we pray, worship, and praise our creator.
Our values are unconditional love for one another and mutual trust.
In the church, we communicate to each other either verbally or non-verbally, through dancing and singing physically as a form of tradition of the discourse community.
Problems and Issues.
United States Army:
1. Integrity is one of the values of the US Army, is an issue the army is facing today. Most service members lack honesty, strong moral principles, and moral uprightness.
2. Building and sustaining the DOD technological dominance; This is a self-help website in which the soldiers upload or download documents for their personal use. This website faces mismanagement and ends up not serving its intended purpose.
3. Another issue is Duty. Duty is another value of the US Army; however, it is a challenge because service members go AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave).
4. Limited time with family. Due to the nature of the job, service members are always away from family for months or even years depending on their assignments.
Engineering club:
1. Climate crisis. we face challenges with poor weather conditions which affect the execution of our Duty because scientific procedures are mostly affected by temperature and pressure differences.
2. Pandemic crisis; Pandemic is another issue we are facing in my community because it forces us to carry out Duty virtually, which is not the standard of operation for engineering since our jobs and project are mostly hands-on.
3. We have limited tools or equipment. In this community, we need materials to car out our day-to-day business. Without these resources, we cannot function competently.
Church:
1. Failure to trust one another. This is one of the values that make up this discourse community; it becomes an issue when there is an absence of trust because it will make the community fail to meet its standards.
2. Insufficient love with one another. Love is another great value of a church. When loves dies, the church falls. This is a big issue that we face in our community.
3. Failure in following the rules and regulations of the church. Like every other community, there are always rules and laws. Without law bring chaos. For example, a member of the church community bringing an alcoholic drink into the church, which is against the community’s rules, creates an immediate issue for the church.