What is a Discourse Community Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

What is a Discourse Community - Essay Example What is a Discourse Community? John Swales was seen to ascribe a set of six distinguishing characteristics to help establish and define discourse communities, however, the most important distinguishing characteristic was that first, the community have a broadly agreed upon set of common goals. Secondly, the community needs to have an established mechanism via which its members are able to easily communicate among themselves. Third, an effective discourse community is should be able to effectively use its communication mechanism in providing feedback and information; this may also be seen to serve a relatively secondary goal of aiding the community in realizing its goals. Discourse communities tend to share certain expectations pertaining to the appropriate use of form, function of texts and topics. Fifth, discourse communities generally tend to establish a fundamentally specific lexis an example of which may include the development of specialized technical terminologies. Finally, discourse communities are setup ha ving a given threshold level, this level ensures that the members of a given discourse community have a certain basic degree of discourse expertise. Before one can be able to join any given discourse community, they should essentially be able to sufficiently be able to exhibit a certain given degree of knowledge structures. This knowledge of structures that members re required to show an understanding of is seen to generally relate to not only formal schemata such as communication between members, goals of the community and genre convention, it is also seen to be related to the world (Zhu, 35). The School Football Discourse Community Being a student at our school, the importance of football in the school cannot be over emphasized in any way. The first time I attended one of the school’s football games, I was totally taken in by the excitement of the crowd that sought to cheer on the team to victory. Though out the game, it was not uncommon to hear certain calls being called into play. The coach constantly called for plays using terms such as â€Å"13-17-2-8 Action† or â€Å"4 to 6-6-3†. Although these calls appeared gibberish to a bystander like myself, the football players clearly understood, what they were being instructed to do as was evidenced by their changing of their formation as well as play. This was seen to result in very positive results for the football team. Wherever a play did very well or happened to score, the players would quickly run to the player and jump all over each other in what to me seemed to be a painful experience. I constantly asked myself exactly how one could possibly score if by doing so, one essentially risked having the weight of almost half of the team piling on himself. However, my unvoiced pitch-side concerns did not essentially seem to matter to them. After the brief wild moment of celebration, the members of the team would exchange a special handshake with each other. I often found myself envying the close relationship and synergy between the team members. However, my flimsy attempts to qualify to join the elite team of about 24 members in a school with thousands of students met a disastrous ending and I left the field half feeling that I had essentially made a great fool of myself at the tryouts. The members of this discourse community also tend to constantly hang around each other at school discussing football matters and plans so as to help improve their game, they also commonly discuss the strategies that they plan to employ so as to beat