The author Joe Swales lists the six characteristics of what makes a discourse community. The first characteristic “has a broadly agreed set of common public goals”. The second characteristic “has mechanisms of intercommunication among members”. The third characteristic “uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”. The fourth characteristic “utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aim”. The fifth characteristic “has acquired some specific lexis”. The sixth characteristic “has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise”.
My Discourse Community
After reading Joe Swales’s article I thought about my discourse community. I came to the conclusion that my discourse community is a track and field team. According to the characteristics John Swales listed, my track and field team fits all six characteristics listed above. We as a collective group all have a common goal which is to be the best at our respective event and also win in our respective event. In our team, we all talk to each other. When talking about practice or meets we all talk in an app called “group me” so we all have the information. In track and field, we use leaderboards to indicate placement and stats for athletes’ placement. This is a form of a genre in this discourse community. Lexis examples in this discourse community are “Event”, “Pace”, and “Meet”. On our track and field team we have our head coach, strength coach, and captains all in that order. With that said my discourse community track and field is in fact a discourse community.
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