Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Discourse Community
Discourse Community
Community Care
Karina Sosa
Introduction
group that has common goals and that work together to achieve those goals. John Swales felt it
was necessary to elaborate on what a discourse community is and did so by creating a set of
guidelines. To prove that Swales test works I studied an online community named
Community Care. Community Care assist social workers by providing them with a selection of
products that supports their continuously expanding career. Their resources range from online
direct messaging to publicly held convention to provide social workers with the best insight to
assisting their clients. I will be going over Swales six characteristics using Community Care as
an example.
Literature Review
John Swales' article The Concept of Discourse Community presents the six components
that he believes should be with in a discourse community. The first component he lays out is
common goals, a community should agree on a set of goals to accomplish as one rather than
individually. Following that component, the members of a community must be able to interact
and communicate with each other using ordinary resources. In using these resources, a
community conveys information and receives feedback to improve and further themselves
towards the goal. To develop their objective a community uses genres, One of the purposes of
this criterion is to question discourse community status for new or newly-emergent groupings.
Such groupings need, as it were, to settle down and work out their communicative proceedings
and practices before they can be recognized as discourse communities. (Swales, 1990, p. 222),
they spread their ideas with the public to get closer to their goal. A community speaks through a
specific language, they develop abbreviations and acronyms that only members within the
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community understand. Lastly, a discourse community should have levels of expertise in which
individuals can have different roles of leadership. Swales mentions that if a community is
missing either of these components they are not considered a discourse community.
Intertextuality and the Discourse Community written by James Porter stresses the
importance of intertextuality in a discourse community which is that all writing and speech
originates from one system. There are two types of intertextuality; iterability and presupposition.
Iterability is the repetition of quotes or references. Presuppositions are assumptions made from
reading a text, the words aren't clearly there. In other words, intertextuality explains that we as
writers get our ideas from other ideas or resources and that plagiarism is unavoidable. Porter
(1986) defines discourse communities as, a group of individuals bound by a common interest
who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated (p. 38-39). In
his opinion a discourse community should have common interests, forums and may not
Swales and Porters opinions differ on discourse communities but somewhere along the
lines they have a couple similarities. They both agree that a discourse community should be a
group of people joining due to related interests or goals. Communication with in the group
should have approved artifacts or channels which could extended from emails, phone calls, text,
apps, etc. Their definition of discourse community begins with the same idea but eventually
Methods
Community Care is an online community, I visited their website and read all their
information looking for key points. The website allows you to sign up and create an account in
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which they deliver news and analysis directly to your inbox to help you keep up to date with the
latest developments in social care. It also provides a product called Community Care Inform, an
online resource for social care professionals working with children and/or adults to make
confident and legal decisions. It is a key tool to help you achieve consistent high quality social
work practice. Community Care also offers the best social care jobs and candidates. Those who
are seeking a job can search and apply online for the latest social care jobs. They also work in
partnership with social care employers helping recruit the right social care candidates. They also
host the largest convention in the United Kingdom called Community Care Live, it is a free
event for the social work field. It provides essential learning and professional development
through a mixture of training sessions, panel discussions, case studies and interactive learning.
People who attend can also meet and network with a range of local service providers in the field.
Discussion
The goal of Community Care is to present social workers with the finest and latest
information in their field. All their products are based around the idea of helping social workers
learn and practice proper skills to enhance their professional careers. A couple of their
mechanisms are the Community Care account, inform and jobs all found on their website. The
purpose of these mechanisms is to be able to communicate properly with group members, they
can interact easily and understand each other allowing them to achieve their goal. The genre that
Community Care has is the annual convention which they organize specifically to gather
thousands of people in the field of social work to teach and learn from one another.
Community Care doesnt fit the last two components of Swales six characteristics test,
language and expertise, but according to Porter it continues to be a discourse community. The
community holds a wide range of members and participants. These fellow acquaintances work
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together to help execute their set goals. They have common grounds of communication that
allow them to continuously stay in contact and further their aim. All levels of social care workers
Conclusion
Even though Community Care doesnt completely fit the criteria that Swales provides, it
does fit Porters. Communication is vital in all discourse communities especially in Community
Care because they are an online organization; they wouldnt survive and prosper without it. Its
members comprehend what it takes to make this organization effective and successful. These
methods of communication are essentially what makes Community Care a discourse community.
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References
Porter E. James, J. E. P. (1986). Intertextuality and The Discourse Community, 5 (1), 34-47.