Speech Communities

A discourse community comprises of a group of people sharing a common and distinct mode of communication or discourse, especially within a particular domain of intellectual or social activity (Oxforddictionaries, 2017). Some of the discourse communities I consider to be a part of, include an Indian joint family, my peer group, high school education in India, the Apple community and education at Pace university.

Do you ever think about the way you speak and why? Well, Paul Robert does an excellent job explaining why people use the dialect they use in Speech Communities. He discusses that people change their use of language throughout their lives to conform to either society or to what kind of person they want to be, or to just conform to who they need to be at a particular moment, in which I agree. People’s choice of language, including myself, are affected by many of their surroundings, such as where they live and grow up at, their peers, and a person’s work place.

Life is full of different paths that each person has to take to achieve their goals. In those roads, people might find groups that share ideas, knowledge, culture, or tastes with them, called discourse communities, which can lead to live experiences that might turn unforgettable. People can join an infinite number of these groups, however in order to accomplish that they must convince its members by applying some techniques taught in this class of English 1301, for example, knowing the group’s rhetorical situation, i.e. its cultural context, motivations, the audience itself, etc. or applying the different Aristotelian appeals such as ethos (appeal to credentials and experience), pathos (appeal to emotions) or logos (appeal

In his article “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Professor John Swales defines what a discourse community is, following with a list of six different points that a group must align with in order to qualify as a discourse community. These parameters are as follows: “a broadly agreed set of common public goals,” “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members,” the use of “participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”, use or possession of “one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims”, “some specific lexis”, and “a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” (471-473).

Researcher John Swales in “ The Concept of Discourse Community” explains that there are six characteristics that need to be identified for a group of people to be a discourse community. According to Swales, there are six characteristics that make up a discourse community. They are common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among members, participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback, utilizing one or more genres in communication, a specific lexis, and a threshold level of members with a degree of relevant content and discourse expertise (220-222). Discourse is in communities are all around us.

Finding people who share common interests and enjoy the same activities as yourself can often be difficult to find, but is necessary to have. Especially during college, a time where you are receiving your independence, but unsure of what that truly means, feeling lonely is valid and expected. However, college can offer many resources to aid you in these emotions, by having plenty of discourse communities you can join, or even offering you the opportunity to create your own. As quoted by Herzberg in The Concept of Discourse Community, “the idea of a “discourse community” is not well defined yet” (469). Despite the vague concept John Swales offers, he further goes on to elaborate on what six characteristics discourse communities can be identified through. A discourse community which one of my roommates participates in is the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA). The VSA is a cultural club for students at University of California, Davis, who identify as Vietnamese, and want to come together with others a part of the same background. The VSA is a perfect model of a discourse community, as it passes the checkpoints Swales provides to identify one.

Education may be the mold of our future, but the mold behind education is teachers. Behind all intelligent students lays a common factor, teachers. This paper will be focused on the discourse community which lays within the walls of James Bowie Elementary in Richardson, Texas. From interviews and observations to external research, I have been able to find and understand the most important aspect of this chosen community, communication. Communication is a vital role in this community because not only is it the way that they communicate with their peers, but when teachers communicate with each other they are showing their students how to do it. To begin, I brainstormed about my knowledge of this community. From the time I was a child to now,

Unconsciously, we all speak different languages; we categorize the way we speak by the environment and people at which we are speaking too. Whenever a character enters an unfamiliar environment, they experiment with language to find themselves and understand reality. For immigrants, language is a means to retain one’s identity; however, as they become more assimilated in their new communities their language no longer reflects that of their identity but of their new cultural surroundings. When an immigrant, immigrates to a new country they become marginalized, they’re alienated from common cultural practices, social ritual, and scripted behavior. It’s not without intercultural communication and negotiation

According to Swales, there are two types of communities: speech and discourse. Swales defines a speech community as a group that shares similar linguistic goals, similar language, or both as “a community sharing knowledge of the rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech” (Swales, 1990). Swales also identifies that speech communities inherit their members, unlike the discourse community that recruits its members (Swales, 1990). Although these two communities may appear to be the same, to be considered a

Attention Getter: According to epa.gov, “Each person in the United States produces an average of 4 pounds of household hazardous waste each year for a total of about 530,000 tons/year.”

SPECIFIC PURPOSE: By the end of my speech, my audience will know the history of Walt Disney, his invention of Disney World, and how his invention has impacted people.

4: We are slowly turning into slaves of technology; setting our mindsets into shortcuts, to abbreviations, to initials, to emojis, to GIFs, to stickers, and to memes.

Among the most important concepts to emerge are those relating to dialects and language standards. Sociolinguists have documented the presence of dialects in every language. These dialects, all of which are legitimate, are associated with educational, economic, social and historical conditions. Hence, even if an individual scrupulously studies all the possible dictionaries of a random language, he would still be somewhat of a stranger to that language since he is unaware of all the dialectal changes.

We live in a generation where losing your phone is worse than losing your virginity.

Talking about “dialects”, a term often mentioned along is “standard language”. When being brought into comparison with “dialect”, “standard language” usually serves as a legitimate variant with the highest level of excellence (Bex & Watts, 1999). Though positive in nature, standardization - the procedure of standardizing a language – often raises heated controversy because of its consequences on not only linguistics field but also the society. In the second part of the essay, I will focus on the disadvantages of language standardization.