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DXC Technology Discourse Community
DXC Technology Discourse Community
DXC Technology Discourse Community
INTRODUCTION
Discourse communities are people who have the same understanding and basics as their peers,
they use these understandings to achieve their common goals. In my example I will be using DXC
community I interviewed Ilse Ortiz, a software developer who works in this company to provide
great IT service to MMIS (Medicaid Management Information System), in my interview I had her
explain to me the different ways that Swales discourse community implements into her workforce
LITERATURE REVIEW
who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated (1986, Pg. 400),
Swales and porter say that discourse communities are the way of language people use in their work
place between their peers and that these discourse communities have various genres that only the
people that are familiar in this workplace understand the genres or their language, A discourse
community is a group of people who speak the same language, or in other words people who
share an interest in certain topics, share a body of knowledge about those topics, and possess a
common vocabulary for discussing those topics (The student guide, 2015, p. 206). Understanding
discourse communities and the fundamental meaning of the theory helps us understand the
language of various work corporations or discourse communities and get to understand what is the
purpose of their language/genres is, understanding discourse communities help us make it easier
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to integrate ourselves into a discourse community or work force by understanding that each
different one of them have their own language and their own set of goals. Porter also expresses the
idea of intertextuality This is the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that all writing
and speech indeed, all signs arise from a single network (pg. 396) I believe that by this porter
says that each idea that we have connects the dots back to someone elses thought and no ones
idea is pure in their own, all of the various discourse communities fall into this because all of them
needed to have started from someones elses idea and networked from there creating their own
PRIMARY RESEARCH
As my primary research I chose to interview Ilse Ortiz who is a software developer at DXC
Information System) and Medicare, she specializes in creating greater values for the clients,
partners, and shareholders. I interviewed and observed Ilse at her work place here in El Paso and
I was really impressed by the amount of discourse community communications system they use
and all the different kind of text/language the developers use at this company. The developers at
the company mainly focus on Work Skype between the people at the company, the workers used
the chat or the video chat, when they have conferences they use the meeting calls or to reach all of
the employees they sent out an email to all of them through Outlook. When talking to a person
above them for example their boss they choose to send an email because it is more formal then
starting a chat in skype. Most of the projects the developers are in are with teammates from all
over the country, therefore when they need to communicate with each other the only option for
DISCUSSION
Swales tests fit the pieces perfectly into DXCs company and showed me that discourse
communities are everywhere in the work force and in what you study. First in the test is the
common goal, the goal for all the employers at DXC is to develop software in technology for the
companies they are hired to support. The workers use various of ways to communicate through the
day and the most frequent one is through Outlook, they use email to communicate to their superiors
or also use skype to make conference calls with the people in their projects. All of their
communication system revolves around their computers since most of their team members are
spread out around the country and the easiest way to communicate and to ask advise is through
their work network, making these tools their most powerful participatory mechanisms. One genre
of DXC is to develop software, for example in DXC they develop software to support the
applications for Medicaid and Medicare. The language of software engineers goes very in depth
and it depends very much in which company you work for to really understand the language
fluently, some of the few words they utilize are code variables, tables, aidcategory, and diagnosis.
Code variables are used to manage data in a flow of a C program that could be integer character,
numeric, or alpha numeric, in this case C programs are source codes for MMIS. Tables are a set
of data that are structured in columns and are used in relational data bases, tables are used to store
all of their data. Aidcategory is a way to separate the recipients(clients) which are the people in
care at the hospitals, these people have benefits and the benefits are separated by group codes, the
software engineers separate them and see which recipients are qualified for certain benefits, the
last word of the language they use is diagnosis which is a group of codes for the recipients
diagnosis in that way in the MMIS the different kind of diseases apply the correct rate of service.
Furthermore, there are four different level of developers, the lowest is developer one which is the
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entry level, their job is to develop software under the surveillance of another developer higher than
them also known as the subject matter expert(SME), second is software developer two which job
is to develop software under their own analysis and designs, third is the software developer three
which is a technical leader or an SME, the last is a software developer four which can become an
application architect, application architects dont develop software they design the infrastructure
of the application. Through Swales test applied into the DXC corporation I noticed that all of the
engineers here never had their own ideas and it was impossible to because all of their work comes
back from one idea of one person and that person networked his ideas to every software engineer
CONCLUSION
Before stepping into the company of DXC Technology I had realized that this corporation fit into
the description of a discourse community through asking Ilse questions in the interview, while I
explained to her what genres was in discourse community and the meaning of language she gave
me some words that she frequently uses with her co-workers and I had no idea what they meant
until she explained all of them in very big detail, when I walked into the company I could see
cubicle after cubicle of workers in their laptops and most of them were either on a skype call or
conference call communicating with their peers to achieve their task at hand. Because of this I
realized that her corporation was a discourse community and fit perfectly into the six Swales
characteristics.
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REFERENCES
Swales, John M. The Concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and Research Settings. Cambridge [England: Cambridge UP 1990] print