In the article "The Concept of a Discourse Community" by John Swales (1990). He aimed to define the meaning of a discourse community; then he carefully deconstructs discourse community into six fundamental attributes that are important for recognizing a discourse community. Swales’ definition of a discourse community is a group that has objectives or purposes, and utilize communication to accomplish those objectives. He states that a discourse community is presented as a more practical and purposeful gathering than speech fraternity or speech group. The six essential characteristics that Swales (1990) belief to be the core of a discourse community are its goals, intercommunication, participation, genres, Lexis, and expertise.
We communicate in many ways, either by email, telephone, text, face to face, social media or letters and the language we use allows us to get things done, nonetheless the language and communication method in which we chose to use can vary depending on the discourse community. Much like John Swales suggests a discourse community involves a group of people who share the same common public goals, such as shared interests, rules, structure, and vocabulary. When thinking about the several discourse communities I am evolved in, which include family, coaching football, college student, and a few friends. These discourse communities have influenced me, given me insight of where I come from and tell who I am as a person. I also believe much like Swales,
For my ethnographic research, I had chosen to study my video gaming group. The idea of video gaming may be a habit for some people, but with the right research I found that it is not just a necessity, moreover it is enjoyable for all that play video games. Video gaming is not always for fun but for bringing my friends to together to play such games. This organization had found that video gaming is not just for fun, but for bringing others together while playing video games. What the community has not expected is that most gamers are not the same, everyone comes from a different background and differ in many ways.
Communication is one of the most important aspects of human life. Without communication, we would be a primitive society of wild animals, unable to cooperate and achieve great feats, such as building the Pyramids, landing on the Moon, or organizing a democracy. All people rely on communication to express ideas that motivate positive societal and political change. Yet not everybody communicates in the same way. There are several thousand languages that people speak; there are several hundred thousand people around the world that suffer from disabilities such and blindness or deafness that require special means of communications such as braille or sign language.
It can be difficult to understand what it means to be a discourse or what communities fall under that category, and that is why I feel like John Swales’ definition of a discourse community is the the one that makes the most sense and the one that almost anybody can apply to communities they are part of and determine if they are discourses or not. Even though Gee and Porter had good points regarding discourses and good arguments, one almost had to be a linguist to fully understand what they were saying. They did help Swales get his point across more clearly in some instances though. Thanks to Swales I now know for a fact that my English 1113 class is a discourse community and I achieved that by following the six rules Swales presented as necessary to be a discourse community. Gee, James P. “Literary, Discourse, and Linguistics.”
250 - 255) used ethnography. Ethnography is the systematic study of people and culture, and it carries out broad observation of a group being involved in their activities over a period of time (Brownlow, 2012). Corsaro (1985), is interested in how friendship is described in communication between children, and what it means in certain places at specific times, rather than in a formal interview. In support, he video records them and makes notes of children's activities and their collaborations with others. The researcher needs to become a member of a specific group and spend months and sometimes even years, in order to carry out observations from within the group (Brownlow, 2012).
According to “The Concept of Discourse Community”, there are six defining characteristics of a discourse community, Having common goals, Participatory mechanism, Information exchange, Community specific genres, Highly specialized terminology, and a High level of experience in all. The discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals and there are many ways to participate but it varies based on the community like meetings, telecommunications correspondence, newsletters, and conversations. It also uses participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback, and specific genres are unique communication forms used by a discourse community to share specialized knowledge and discuss topics relevant to their interests. In conclusion, Swales' reading defines discourse communities as cohesive groups that share a common enthusiasm and use distinct communication practices to achieve their
Languages are complex because they are made up of many components. Some components include the culture, meaning, and interpretation. The way people understand language has to do mostly with their culture and their understanding of what is being said. Also, depending upon where someone is raised, the pronunciation of certain words can be different and therefore it influences the understanding. My goal in this paper is to demonstrate that language and culture are intertwined.
The two key topics in class in the last weeks, for me. Two of the most relevant topics developed in the last weeks were: non-verbal communication and the barriers to communication. Everytime we communicate with another person or group of people, we have to take into account some factors other than what we are actually saying that can affect how the message is going to be received: body language, tone, intonation, facial expressions, and others; this is what we understand for non-verbal communication. As we saw in class “55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.”
All human beings communicate either with intention or without intention every single day. According to Barth (2014), Palo Alto Team stated “ one cannot not communicate” in one of their axioms of communication. Communication can be defined as “a social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and interpret meaning in their environment” (Went & Turner, 2014, p. 5). It can be divided into three models in order to enhance our understanding towards the function of communication, which are mainly linear model, interactional model and transcactional model (Wood, 2009). According to Went & Turner, 2014, there are also different traditions and contexts in communication where it helps us to break down difficulty when we attempt to understand communication theory and their process.
The speech pattern has its definite form and therefore its functional features are strictly correlated with the nature social codes. Thus sociolinguistics, as an interdisciplinary study of language use, attempts to show the relationship between language and
The world we live in today is predominately changing with the advancement of digital communication in the daily aspects of our life. The rapid growth and evolution of digital communication, has resulted in it now becoming the backbone of the way we interact with other people. Beginning from simple 160-character SMS messages to text’s influence on the internet including Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Instagram and then introduced on our mobile phones with BBM and whatsapp; digital communication has become a part of our spoken discourse. Digital communication in every aspect has impacted our lives as it helps jobs and businesses communicate a lot faster through e-mail, multimedia and texting.
In society today, communication classes are highly over looked because of our new developing technology. People don’t realize how much a communication class could benefit them. We have lost sight of verbal communication skills. This class has taught me to put my phone down and communicate with others. It has opened my eyes to the real world without technology.
Introduction Information communication technology provides the society with new communication capabilities. People can now communicate with others using videos from others of different parts of the world, instant messaging, social media sites like face book, twitter which allows people to remain in contact and communicate and share information easily and on regular basis. The world has become a global village. Internet and computer has made the communication process very fast and has also united people.
In the social life, language and society are two things that support each other. It is impossible if there is society without language and there is language without society, because language is a device to communicate one to another (Adam J.H, 1982; 3). There is the study to organize between language and the society that is called sociolinguistics.
