CL 7/3 – The Concept of Discourse Community

Text Questions

1. speech communities are centripetal because they tend to absorb people into the general fabric and gain members through birth, accident, or adoption, discourse communities are centrifugal because they tend to separate people into occupational or speciality-interest groups and gain members through persuasion, training, or qualification
2. according to Swales, the six defining characteristics of a discourse community are:
   1. having a broadly agreed set of common public goals
   2. having mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
   3. using its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback
   4. utilizing and possessing one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims
   5. having some specific lexis
   6. having a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise
3. Swales says that discourse communities often have tensions, discontinuities, and conflicts in the sort of talk and writing between members, which makes his definition of a discourse community sort of removed from reality because it does not take these issues in to account

Video Questions

1. Swales sees a gap in how people define discourse community as different from speech communities because there is not a definition of discourse community that is clear or specific enough
2. this piece fills this gap by proposing a set of six specific characteristics to define a discourse community
3. the audience for this text is the other members of Swales’s academic community because he is trying to put forth his opinion on an ongoing argument within that academic community that is trying to define discourse communities
4. the danger of an article like this is that strict characteristics like this can be used to refuse to acknowledge certain groups as discourse communities