English 2150 Blog

Annotation for The Concept of Discourse Community — John Swales

Summary: In this article John Swales discusses the ideas of discourse communities and speech communities. He mentions the definitions of both speech communities and discourse communities and also conceptualization and examples of a discourse community. He mentions that a speech community is a group of people that share linguistic rules, cultural concepts, and shared regulative rules. So therefore a speech community can be the English speaking people of the world. He notes that being part of the speech community is usually done by birth or when you learn the language of the community. A discourse community is something that can change and to be part of a discourse community you must be accepted by the group and is made by persuasion, occupation, etc. He also gives six different points that make up and describe a discourse community. These points are having the same goals, mechanisms of intercommunication between members, using mechanisms to provide feedback, utilizing one or more genre in communication,  acquiring some lexis, and having a level of members with relevant content and expertise. He also gives an example of a discourse community that he is part of, which is Hong Kong Study Circle. He points out the groups interest which is studying the usage of stamps in Hong Kong. So even though the group has many members from different countries they all have one interest and that is the interest in stamps prints and usage.

Evaluation: John Swales did a great job of clearly distinguishing between a speech community and discourse community. Being part of a speech community is basically being able to speak the language of the community. To be part of a discourse community, one must have the same interests and they must also have the certain qualifications of the discourse community. The mechanisms of speaking to members of the discourse community stood out to me because with that point he also brings in the idea of tone. I believe tone is something that really distinguishes discourse communities because even if the language is the same the way you interpret and communicate is very important to the community. Giving an example of what he thinks a discourse community also was a great way to explain his idea of the discourse community and the difference between a speech and discourse community.