...So what is a discourse community? When you google discourse community, you read, “It is a group of people sharing a common goal using communication to reach that common goal.”Getting more into detail what exactly is a discourse community, we have John Swales’ academic essay, ‘The Concept of Discourse Community’, which breaks it down into six characteristics: “1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5. In addition...
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...To maintain order in a community, one must adapt to the way of life in that community. In this sample discourse community analysis, the author speaks about joining the band community, and what kind of things he/she had to adapt to, and learn in order to successfully be part of said community. The author begins to build his/her credibility by effectively using the following strategies: diction, point of view, and tone. With the use of these devices, the author is able to appeal to their classmates on a more personal rather than professional level. In this essay, the author talks about having to learn about “the pyramid of sound,” which he/she states is very important in the band community. When describing the importance of this skill, the...
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...I am a part of a very specific and individualized discourse community of people who learn and play the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. This game is a worldwide phenomenon, with players spanning the entire globe, so intern, the discourse community is very unique in being so widespread. I personally play with a select few members from my family, as well as close family friends, adding myself to a sub-discourse community. The foundation for Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, is storytelling. Your characters step into a realm unlike your own and create their story, one dice roll at a time. There are many values that remain upheld in this discourse community. The rules are expected to be followed at all times, and although it doesn't...
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...Discourse Community Analysis The term discourse community has been defined as “The focus is on texts and language, the genres and lexis that enable members throughout the world to maintain their goals, regulate their membership, and communicate efficiently with one another” (Swales pp.24-27). A personal discourse community is choir and singing. Some criteria for a discourse community are common goals, communication, and lexis. These help a community succeed. In my life as a choir student, I bonded with other students over the love of singing and music, to me that's what makes the choir a discourse community. The first criteria that you need as a choir student is Goals. Two common goals as a group are to memorize our music, and to bond with...
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...Robert Kelly Holly Kopcha ENGL 2089 106 3/6/2016 Marching Band The marching band is a community all their own. They all speak to each other in a language that is all their own. It was always easy to spot someone in school who was a “band kid” because of the way they carried themselves or the way they talked or the people they associated with. Kids in the marching band hang out with each other during and outside of school. They are a community all their own with unique characteristics. The marching band has specific goals that they set for themselves as well as for the group. Individually the members of the marching band have their own goals that they need to accomplish for the ultimate goal of making the group better. Each member will practice their music at home or in the practice rooms during class in order to get better at memorizing and accenting their music. They do this to help the group sound better when they are at competition. Band member also have a goal to memorize their drill sheets. This helps them to where they are supposed to be on the field at a certain time. Doing this helps the group look more unified in their formations. The group’s goals are to perform well at competitions and ultimately win a trophy for their school. To obtain this goal the group will practice for 2-4 days a week. Depending on the day or what needs work they will either work on drill or their music. Drill is the position in which the person should be in a specific time during...
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...Islam’s ‘theology of rape’ The sound file aims intervene the discourse of Islamic religion through accounting for the recent but continuing exploitation of Islamic women, in particular, the religious minority group of Yaziti. Foucoult argues that discourse is ‘often rooted in organisaions which both control and are structured by distinct disciplinary knowledge’ (Frow, 2004) regulating the conduct of others (Hall 1997). Such as groups and members of ISIS, representing the Islamic state of Iraq which are regulated by it’s religious discourse. The discourse itself, formulated and produced objects within subjects of our knowledge (Barker. C and Galaniski, D 2001), such as texts like the Qu’ran, a central religious text of Islam, providing strict principles and ethics, encoding a way of behavior that is practiced globally. Acts such as prayer can be understood as a certain tradition or behavior that is governed by religious belief. Throughout the soundscape, I have shown how customs, like this are often exploited through acts of sex and sexual slavery towards the women of Iraq. Evidently, social order is constituted by discourses of power (Barker, C. & Galasinski, D. 2001), thus I chose to highlight the power of the ISIS and regulation of it’s religious discourse through audio reports of women suffering from rape to connote the authority of the ISIS. Hall argues that nothing has any meaning outside it’s discourse’ (Hall.S 1997, pg 45), evidently the file is sequenced to open...
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...to how language interacts with media. It investigates the forms of language found in media discourse; how patterns in such language use contribute to recognizable media genres and styles; and, broader social themes and consequences that arise from media language. It uses a wide variety of real texts from the media specifically from Magazines. Boles (2012) believes that each magazine uses linguistic techniques these language features are creatively used in magazines by the writers to attract and entertain the target audience as they only have a small space and time to get the attention of the potential buyer of the product. Bell (2010) emphasizes the importance of the processes which produce media language, as stories are molded and modified by various hands. He stresses it is indeed stories that journalists and editors produce, not articles. These stories have viewpoint, values and structure that can be analyzed. He is concerned, too, with the role of the audience in influencing media language styles, and in understanding, forgetting or misconceiving the news presented to it. A feature story is a special human interest story article that is not closely tied to a recent news event. It focuses on particular people, places, and events, and it goes into great detail regarding concepts and ideas of specific market interest. The study primarily aims to provide a contrastive analysis between the use of the variety of english in love songs. The study specifically aims to (1)...
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...What would you say is Swales’ overall thesis for this article? What is he trying to prove? I believe Swale's overall thesis is that, the current definition for discourse community is vague and suggestive; centered around some main ideas but is still not well defined. I believe he is trying to prove that a specific set of characteristics must be present in order to define a discourse community. What discourse communities do you belong to professionally and personally? What discourse community do you hope to belong to in a future profession? Name at least one from each category. Professionally, I belong to the retail discourse community because I am currently working at Victoria's Secret. Personally, I belong to the discourse community of business...
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...Micro-Ethnography discourse communities exist worldwide from communities who represent single mothers, to employees working within the workforce, to those who commute to work every day where they may be involved in either leadership or support roles, to those who participate in sports, or those who simply participate in extracurricular activities such as a church group or simply groups of people whom share the same goals, language, interests, or practices, or religion. Social discourse communities encompass any group of 2 or more members which share a common set of goals or duties or simply share a similar group dynamic. Within Gee’s “What Is Literacy?” Gee identifies the broad definition of a discourse. Gee writes, A socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network. (1) Most can easily identify with many separate discourses as a result from their raising such as in “Speaking in Tongues” or as a result of their education and adaptability to their environments as in “First They Changed My Name”. Human’s ability to adapt uses our “Get in where you fit in” mind set. Acting as one’s camouflage allows us as humans to avoid sticking out and instead encourages our abilities to blend in with the crowd and not be treated differently or singled out from the majority. While working within a very upstanding company, I was recently promoted to Environmental...
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...conduct discourse analysis on an artefact that denotes my placement organisation, its website http://womensandgirls.org.au. (Blacktown Women’s and Girls’ Health Centre, 2018). Hall (2001) states that Foucault’s definition of discourse moves its focus from linguistics and postulates discourse “as system of representations”. Foucault defines discourse are social systems that produce knowledge and meaning. They are practices produced by the effects of power within a social order (Adams, 2017; Hall, 2001). Foucault argued that...
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...The media Anne O’Keeffe Historical overview of media discourse ‘The media’ is a very broad term, encompassing print and broadcast genres, that is anything from newspaper to chat show and, latterly, much more besides, as new media emerge in line with technological leaps. The study of ‘the media’ comes under the remit of media studies from perspectives such as their production and consumption, as well as their aesthetic form. The academic area of media studies cuts across a number of disciplines including communication, sociology, political science, cultural studies, philosophy and rhetoric, to name but a handful. Meanwhile, the object of study, ‘the media’, is an ever-changing and ever-growing entity. The study of ‘the media’ also comes under the radar of applied linguistics because at the core of these media is language, communication and the making of meaning, which is obviously of great interest to linguists. As Fairclough (1995a: 2) points out, the substantively linguistic and discoursal nature of the power of the media is a strong argument for analysing the mass media linguistically. Central to the connection between media studies and studies of the language used in the media (media discourse studies) is the importance placed on ideology. A major force behind the study of ideology in the media is Stuart Hall (see, for example, Hall 1973, 1977, 1980, 1982). Hall (1982), in his influential paper, notes that the study of media (or ‘mass communication’) has had...
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...a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: E-rater®, an automated essay scoring system and Critique Writing Analysis Tools, a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, that identify discourse elements in the essay, and that recognize elements of undesirable style. These evaluation capabilities provide students with feedback that is specific to their writing in order to help them improve their writing skills. Both applications employ natural language processing and machine learning techniques. All of these capabilities outperform baseline algorithms, and some of the tools agree with human judges as often as two judges agree with each other. 2. Application Description Criterion contains two complementary applications that are based on natural language processing (NLP) methods. The scoring application, e-rater®, extracts linguisticallybased features from an essay and uses a statistical model of how these features are related to overall writing quality to assign a holistic score to the essay. The second application, Critique, is comprised of a suite of programs that evaluate and provide feedback for errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, identify the essay’s discourse structure, and recognize...
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...COGNITIVE ORGANIZATION AND IDENTITY MAINTENANCE IN MULTICULTURAL TEAMS A Discourse Analysis of Decision-Making Meetings Jolanta Aritz Robyn C. Walker University of Southern California Measuring culture is a central issue in international management research and has been traditionally accomplished using indices of cultural values. Although a number of researchers have attempted to identify measures to account for the core elements of culture, there is no consensus on those measures. This article uses an alternative method—discourse analysis—to observe what actually occurs in terms of communication practices in intercultural decision-making meetings, specifically those involving U.S.-born native English speakers and participants from East Asian countries. Previous discourse studies in this area suggest that differences in communication practices may be attributed to power differentials or language competence. Our findings suggest that the conversation style differences we observed might be attributed to intergroup identity issues instead. Keywords: intercultural communication; intercultural communication; group communication; discourse analysis; intercultural management; group decision making; communication accommodation theory In an increasingly global economy, multicultural work teams are becoming more commonplace, and fostering teamwork in multicultural teams is a growing challenge. The growing body of intercultural research suggests important Jolanta Aritz is an Associate...
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...Now when reading thru the “Concept of a discourse community “ I found it a very difficult piece to write about. Really just reading thru it I found myself having to go back over it many times. So for this paper we were soppose to analize a part of the writing. So I decided to go over thse 6 chartestics that swalles talked about. Like I said swales came up with a set of guidelines that a discourse community has to meet to be actulla considered as a discourse community. The six characteristics that are to be included in a discourse community are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genre’s, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise (Swales, John. "The Concept of Discourse Community." (1990): 119-28. Print.)....
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...Title I. Topic The topic of this paper is regarding discourse analysis II. What is Discourse? There is not a straight-forward definition to describe what exactly "discourse analysis" is. Barbara Johnstone, a Professor of English and Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, said the following about what the word "discourse" means, "To discourse analysts, 'discourse' usually means actual instances of communication in the medium of language." (Discourse Analysis, 2002, p 2) So, according to Johnstone (2002), discourse is the occurrences of communication in the form of language. This means there are many ways in which communication can take form in, such as gesture and dance, but discourse focuses in the way language is being used to communicate. I think this definition helps in understanding what discourse analysis is. It is implied, through this definition, that when we are talking about discourse analysis, we are discussing about how language is being used to communicate. This means we don't focus ourselves with language as a system, but rather how language is being applied to express something or to declare a notion. For that reason, when we study about discourse analysis that means we study the process in which language as an instrument of communication is involved. III. Spoken and Written Language Discourse analysis is dealing with analysing the function of language as a tool of communication. When people use language to communicate, they can either use language...
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