Football Team Communication

Football is known all around the world. Almost everyone has seen, played, or heard of the sport. Therefore, there isn’t much we don’t know about the sport. One thing for sure is that communication is an important factor in making any community or group function properly. However, the way a community communicates is specific to that particular group and the experts that are in charge. There has been plenty of research on how a football team functions as a discourse community and the way they communicate between one another. However, the question of how to manage the pressures of communicating between the levels of expertise has yet to be clearly stated. In order to find answer to this question I interviewed football players at the University

Through these questions I was able to gather a conclusion of general sense of managing communication with the group. I used two previous resources to identify the community as a discourse community and to gain knowledge about previous research about communication on a football team. To define the football team as a discourse I used the six defining characteristics by Swales. Once I analyzed the characteristics I realized that this couldn’t be determined until I began to gain inside knowledge of the community and begun conducting my experiment. My interviewees were Duke Hollingsworth a football player at Oklahoma Baptist University, and Dahu Green a football player at the University of Oklahoma. During the interview I asked them general questions about forms of communicating in their group and their personal opinion about the communication forms. I choose these types of questions, because they allowed form a general idea as to how the communication works

“It is hard to conceive, at least in the contemporary English- speaking world, of a group of well- established members of a discourse community communicating among themselves on topics relevant to the goals of community and not using lexical items puzzling to outsiders”(Swales, 2011). This is exactly how the communication in a football team works. All the talk about plays and routes could be quite mind boggling to someone who isn’t apart of the community. With both my interviewees being freshman learning the lexis isn’t something that they did a long time ago. Hollingsworth describes learning communication as just simply hearing how it says and eventually adapting it. This can be referred to the “ Repeatability of certain textual fragments to citation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions, references, and quotations within a discourse, but also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, and phrases in the air, and traditions,”(Porter, 2011). Once a player continually hears a play he will eventually began to understand how these communications work. Green also describes a body language as a form of communication on the field. He said, “ In order to know if a players is ready to complete a play the teammate with make certain body gestures in order to signal if they are ready to continue the play. This connects to the idea of multiple literacies by Branick. Branick