Blog #4 - Discourse Communities

John Swales provides six aspects that are essential to determining whether or not a group of people is a discourse community. They are:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. An example of this would be the utilization of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. 
3. A discourse community has its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.This is where members of a discourse community fully participate in voluntary actions to gain further knowledge. Swales emphasizes that neglecting the voluntary actions would mean that the member is not part of the discourse community. 
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. This pertains to the implemented standards of the discourse community for its members. 
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis (dictionary definition: the vocabulary of a language, as distinct from its grammar; the total stock of words and idiomatic combinations of them in a language). An example of this would be slang. 
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. This depicts that every discourse community needs an acceptable number of experienced and inexperienced members. Swales states that "survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts."

Based off of these six characteristics of a discourse community, I believe that a discourse community is an organization, institution, or club that is unique and is separate from all other groups, while possessing all six traits of a discourse community. 

A very simple discourse community is right in front us: San Diego State University. 

San Diego State's common public goal is to further educate, enlighten, and prepare its students for the real world upon graduation. Its means of communication among its members is through a variety of methods, which include social media, newsletters through email, newspapers, bulletin boards, and of course, face-to-face interaction. San Diego State has its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide knowledge and feedback. This is simply denoted by attendance. San Diego State also has certain and strict standards for its members. For professors, they are expected to adequately teach the material to their students while maintaining protocol. Students, on the other hand, must maintain a certain GPA to be able to stay declared in their respective majors and must also abide to the campus laws and rules. The school does indeed have its own lexis. Such examples include: Leadership starts here, Aztec for life, and the Aztec fight song. Finally, San Diego State contains a reasonable level of relevant and discoursal expertise. You have the school's alumni, the faculty, and the students.