Chhring N Sherpa

English 1121

John Swales, “Reflections on the Concept of Discourse Community”

Quote 1: 
“I first heard the term “discourse community” early in 1986, fairly soon after I had moved to the United States; it was used in a talk at the University of Michigan given by Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. I cannot remember much of the talk at today’s distance, but I do remember how I immediately recognized that the concept of discourse community was precisely the concept I had been looking for since it would provide socio-rhetorical context for my ongoing exploration of (mainly) academic genres.”

Response: I find the opening very interesting because I believed that the concept of discourse community was well comprehended in the history of human civilization since humans had different sets of values or occupations to fulfill. I might be wrong but I believe that swales is referring to the modern discourse community since today human’s work has been modified and advanced and it is not like before. for example, today human society is more developed with means of communication and so on.

Quote 2:  “By the time Genre Analysis was eventually published in 1990, discourse community (DC) had become a member of a trio of interlocking concepts, the other two being genre and language-learning task”

Response: I find this quote interesting because it tells us that discourse community was a new concept and it had been member of a interlocking concepts beside genre and language-learning task. What I believed was that discourse community is the main topic and it is where everything revolved around such as the genre, language, values etc. After reading this quote I found out that people in the past just took the concept of discourse community as something that a group of people belonged to.

Definition = “A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about their goals.”

I can see that this definition defines the concept of modern discourse community since today there are humans who belongs to varieties of group that understand their own basic values, communication and their goals.

My discourse communities :

  1. I listen to music a lot but I listen to a genre called J pop. J pop is a music that is originated in japan, the lyrics are mostly in Japanese and some in English. My favorite J pop idol includes Kenshi Yonezu, Aimyon.

2. I play video games often in my leisure time. I really like to play league of legends which is a MOBA game 5v5. it has set of different champions with varying personalities. I like a champion named Lucian.

3. My major is computer science so I can say that i belong a discourse community of computer science. It focuses on major computer functions, my favorite is coding.