The Relationship of Discourse and Authority- #4 Journaling Question

After an individual has completed the requirements of the degree or been advanced in his or her academic career by other means, there are still issues of authority to contend with. For example, standardized examinations seem to rate a student's intelligence solely off his or her performance on the examination. Unfortunately, a large population of intelligent students do not perform well on standardized tests, so this exam prohibits a plethora of qualified students from reaching their desired positions within the discourse community--i.e. graduate school. Luckily, Johns sees this issue as urgent and believes that the problems of authority, status, and control over community utterances should be discussed in literacy classes. She believes that by assisting students in analyzing authoritative texts and critiquing authority relationships, students will become more aware of these factors affecting their academic lives. Consequently, these students will hopefully be able to produce and comprehend texts that command authority within academic contexts.

Anne Johns on Discourse Communities

In "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity," linguist Anne Johns focuses more broadly on John Swales' definition of discourse communities. Intrigued by Swales' outlook on discourse communities, I believe Anne Johns continues his views in a more in-depth manner in order to combat various conflicts concerning discourse communities. Without discouraging Swales' credibility, Anne highlights that the standards of discourse communities are set in part by the environments in which they are created. People are born, or taken involuntarily by families or cultures, into some communities of practice, such as social, political, and recreational communities. On the other hand, academic communities are selected and voluntary. Following academia, discourse communities continue into the professional life because every major profession has organizations, practices, lexis, and genres. Without a doubt, every individual speaks and acts a certain way depending on their location and their company. For instance, I have a different voice at home, at work, and at school. I believe that Anne's continuation of Swales' scholarly article most definitely made Swales' analysis more believable and relateable.

John Swales' Discourse Communities

Within this excerpt from his accredited book Genre Analysis, John Swales explains the concept of what he calls a “discourse community.” While conceptualizing his definition of a discourse community, Swales proposes six characteristics that he considers to be necessary and sufficient for indentifying a group of people as a discourse community. His definitions and my understandings of them follow:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.---
Whether formal or informal, goals are set by the discourse community that highlights its values, morals, expectations, beliefs, and aspirations.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.---
Discourse communities have mediums or environments of communication that they frequently use in order to relay messages between its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.---
Technology and print sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and books that interest the discourse community’s goals, provide the discourse community ways of obtaining information and sharing back their input.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.---
Due to values and opinions of groupings within discourse communities and continuously changing values of the original discourse community, these individuals constantly adapt and expand their expectations.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. ---
Discourse communities have their own vocabulary, as distinct as its grammar, that isolates the community from outsiders and provides information between members.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. ---
Depending on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts, discourse communities are constantly experiencing shifts of members as people die, leave, or grow older and grow wiser.