Discourse Communities: How Do Communities Shape Writing?
- purpose: argues that literacy learning is never over because we never stop evolving and acquiring new literacies as we move among different discourse communities
- discourses: group members’ shared ways of being in the world
- discourse community: a group of people with shared goals or purposes that uses communication to achieve them
- we readjust our language, interpretations of texts, and our ways of seeing and being in the world based on what discourse community we are in at that moment
- enculturated: adept at the culture
The Concept of Discourse Communities
- purpose: to understand that discourse community is an important concept to argue about
- Swales assumes his readers are familiar with his characteristic of genre
- Swales’s definition of genres: types of texts that are recognizable to readers and writers, and that meet the needs of the rhetorical situations in which they function
- genres develop over time in response to recurring rhetorical needs
- discourse communities develop their own conventions for genres based on their desired goals
- purpose: set forth a proposed set of characteristics that define discourse communities
- speech community: a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech where they share knowledge of at least one form of speech and knowledge of its patterns of use
- not the same as discourse community
- characteristics of a discourse community:
- has a broadly agreed set of common public goals
- has mechanisms of intercommunication among members
- uses participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback
- utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims
- has acquired some specific lexis
- has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise
- discourse communities do not only occur in academic situations
- people can belong to several discourse communities
- people vary in the number of discourse communities they belong to and hence the number of genres that they have command of
- belonging to a discourse community does not imply assimilation
English 2089 