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Sarah Antinucci
Mr. John Chrisman
ENC 1102
24 January 2015
Discourse Community Analysis
A discourse community is described as a group of people who work together
using communication to come up with a set of rules, common goals and specific lexis and
genres to use within the group. Someone who studies the ideas of a discourse community
is John Swales. "John Swales is a professor of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan
Corpus of Academic Spoken English at the University of Michigan” (Wardle and Downs
215). Swale’s believes that in order for a group to be considered a discourse community it
must follow six specific characteristics. The six characteristics are a sharing of common
public goals, having mechanisms of intercommunication, using participatory mechanisms
to give feedback, using one or more genres, specific lexis, and having threshold members
with relevance and stratified expertise. I chose to study a cheerleading team I was
previously involved in because it meets his six criteria.
I chose to study a high school cheerleading team I was previously involved in
because I feel that it strongly defines Swale’s six criteria. Another reason I chose this
group was because I believe we all use different types of communication to meet these
characteristics. As a team we used both written and spoken communication to be able to
come up with our team goals, genres, lexis and even more. (1) I feel this team was very
special to me because we all came together for one reason, which is our common interest
in cheerleading. (2) Although we all did share the same interest in cheerleading, we were
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all very different individuals who learned to work together to create this amazing
discourse community.
I was involved with this discourse community for about four years. While being
involved with this cheerleading team I devoted a lot of money, time, and even
opportunity cost. We participated in various competitions throughout our season. The
competitions cost about $100 per person. In order to do well at those competitions we had
to practice about three afternoons a week as well as in the mornings before school. Not
only did we compete we also cheered on Friday nights at the games during football
season as well as at the basketball games during their season. Participating in those
games took about 4 hours out of our night that we could have been doing something else.
This is an example of opportunity cost within my discourse community. (3) Opportunity
cost was introduced in the articles of Ann John’s. She is a linguist who actually co-edited
a journal with John Swale’s who I introduced earlier. She explains in her articles what a
discourse community is in a more complex way unlike Swale’s who explained it in a
much simpler way. John’s believed there were six lenses that a discourse community
could be analyzed under. One of the lenses was cost which includes opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost is the idea of someone giving up something to do something else that
may be more important. Being a part of this team required a lot of involvement and
effort, which led us to giving up other things that we could have been doing.
As stated earlier, in order to consider a group a discourse community it must meet
Swale’s six characteristics. (4) I will discuss how my team specifically demonstrates
these characteristics. On my team we had many common public goals that we shared,
those goals were to win the State and National championships as well as spread the best
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school spirit we possibly could. We also had mechanisms of intercommunication within
my team, which were holding meetings, (5) and attending the scheduled practices. (6) We
used these practices, and meetings to give each other feedback as well as get feedback
from our coaches. Our coach would verbally communicate feedback to us at these events.
The next trait is having one or more genre. A genre is a certain text that works well for
communication in a certain situation (Bazerman 372). In my specific discourse
community we have a few genres we use to communicate such as a private Facebook
group, e-mail, remind 101, and group messages. The fifth characteristic by Swales is
having specific lexis within a community. Lexis is a set of vocabulary words that are used
within a group that people outside of the group may not understand. In cheerleading we
used lexis such as elevator to describe a stunt, tuck to describe a type of tumbling and lib
to describe a certain position. People that aren’t involved in my discourse community
may misinterpret our definition of those terms. (7) Lastly Swales states that in order for a
group to be considered a discourse community it must have a threshold of members. By
this Swales means that some people may be less experienced than others. On my team not
all of the girls were at the same level when it came to skills. Some girls could do certain
skills that other girls couldn’t perform. Our coach is also a part of this discourse
community. She has the most experience out of everyone in this discourse community.
As you can see from the information above, a discourse community has various
parts to it. According to Swales without all of those characteristics a group isn’t
considered to be a discourse community. I chose to study cheerleading because it was a
discourse community that met his criteria and we used communication to do so. I feel
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being involved in a discourse community is important because it helps bring people
together for the right reasons which are sharing specific common interests.