Discourse communities

Discourse communities, in simple terms is a group of people who are involve in a group with common ideas. In this groups they share ideas with a goal to impact the public. Some groups you can easily join and other groups you must be invited.

     We live in a world full of discourse communities. For example, there’s the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals well known as (PETA). They are the world’s largest animal rights organization. Their goal Is to stop animal cruelty. Another example of a discourse community is a church. Churches main goal is to save the life of people spiritually, help them reach enlightenment. To spread their faith to everyone, spreading good morals and values to the community.

 You get the idea.

     Without being aware of it, we have always been surrounded by discourse communities all of our life starting with schools. How is this possible you might be asking yourself? Well we all experienced different social groups in high school and different kind of clubs. Everyone always wanted to belong to a group in high school, drama club, sports team, Student body or the clique of the popular kids.

     I always wanted to belong in the group of the popular kids but I wasn’t cool enough. Instead I Belonged to the California Scholarship Federation also known in many California schools as CSF.

    CSF is a scholarship society that you had to qualify to join and you had to be invited. You had to be qualified through your academic grades, merit service and citizenship, you also had to be invited by the president/representative of the club. The idea of the club was to recognize academically outstanding high school students who were in the right path towards graduating with honors. According to John Swales article I believe that this scholarship society fits right into the six qualifications of a Discourse community.

My friends reaction when i told them I was asked to join CSF

     According to Swales the first characteristic that defines a discourse community is that the community “has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” Meaning the club does not just exist to take up your free time but rather has a public goal. The public goal of the club is to motivate students to be academic achievers and expand their knowledge in order to become someone in life and make this a better world. Also, it has goals for parents, to support the student academically to help them achieve outstanding grades. Such students that demonstrate outstanding academic achievements were recognized with a quarterly diploma and a recognition in our newspaper.

    A second characteristic that defines a discourse community Is that it has “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” CSF member mechanism of intercommunication was meetings every Wednesday during lunch. In this meetings we had a chance to discuss issues within the program, things we could do to make it better in order to reach out to more students and parents. These meetings also helped us get to know each other on a more personal level.

      “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback” Is the third characteristic in defining a discourse community. We used to take advantage of the school newspaper to write information of upcoming events with the club or to recognize an outstanding academic student. We had to let the school know of our existence and the things we did to recognize honor students.

    A fourth characteristic that identifies a discourse community is, “A discourse community utilizes and hence possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.” Not only did we take up on the genre of the newspaper but we also had member handbooks and flyers specifically made for the group. We also had calendars where it informed us about the next meeting and upcoming events.

    Fifth, “In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.” The Lexis that us as a society took were the focus in grade point average (GPA), merit service and citizenship.

    Finally, “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise.” In this community system we had President, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice President. Each community needs different levels of members to deal with different cases and issues the society might have instead of one person doing everything. And not just anyone qualified for these positions, you needed at least 2 years in the club in order to apply to the position. You needed the experience and the knowledge of the program and the system we used in order to be considered for any position.

     I know, I’m such a loser for being in the honors program but hey, many people envy that. Especially the popular kids. Finally, I had something they didn’t have, a brain. :P