1

Discourse Community Ethnography

Discourse Community Ethnography

Steven Ramirez
UTEP
Rhetoric & Composition
October 22, 2014
LaPrade Paul

Discourse Community Ethnography

Discourse Community Ethnography

A Discourse Community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, goals

or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals. For my Discourse
Community Ethnography I went with the academic option and chose a class called Intro
to Athletic Training. Its a class on Mondays from 6-7:30pm at the Larry K. Durham
sports center and its pretty much a basis class for people presuming a career in Athletic
training or Physical Therapy. I chose this community because its within my major and
fits in to what I plan to do for the rest of my life as a Athletic Trainer or Therapist. For
my ethnography I incorporate Swales, Kain and Wardle, and Porters ideals of a discourse
community to my research to see what I witness lines up with my readings.
Literature Review
In my ethnography I incorporated sources from my readings such as Swales and
his six characteristics of a discourse community and Kain and Wardle's activity theory to
see how a discourse community is structured. In The Concept of Discourse Community
by John Swales (1990), defines what discourse community is, a group of communicators
with a common goal or interest that adopts certain preferred ways of participating in
public discussion. He creates six defining characteristics for identifying a group of
individuals as a discourse community. The six defining characteristics are: a broadly
agreed set of common public goals, has mechanism of intercommunication, participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, possesses one or more
genres, specific lexis and threshold level of members with a degree of relevant content
and discoursal expertise. This article related to my discourse community that I observed

Discourse Community Ethnography

because it defined some of Swales six characteristics of a discourse community and
supported Swales definition of a discourse community.

In Activity Theory by Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle. They introduce to us two
new concepts called activity systems and activity theory. Active system is a basic activity
theory lens, or unit of analysis who share a common object and motive over time. An
activity system is made up of six parts; Ongoing, object-directed, historically condition,
dialectically structured, tool-mediated and human interaction. Activity theory is a lens for
looking at an object or happening and understanding it in new ways. The purpose of an
activity theory was to study people engage in all kinds activities from learning at a
university, to working a manufacturing company. A method of using both activity theory
and active systems is to analyze texts. This is a way to better understand not only texts
functions but also why texts used within a particular system of activity contain certain
content and specific conventions such as formatting, style, and organization. Kains and
Wardles concepts of activity theory and system helped me when I did my observations of
a discourse community because it gave me more of an idea on how to study a discourse
community with there six parts of a activity system.
Discussion

From my observation of the class and the interview with the professor I conduced
the Swales test, in which analyze the extent to which the community meets Swales six
criteria. For the first characteristic what is the classrooms (Discourse community) agreed
set of goals, I interviewed the professor of the class. (Bonnie Heredia, October 20, 2014)
Our set of goals for the class is learning about all the muscles, ligaments, and tendons in
the human body and learning how to prevent injures as well as learning how to strengthen

Discourse Community Ethnography

them. For the second and third characteristics, what mechanisms does this community
use to intercommunicate among its members and what mechanisms primarily to provide
information and feedback. I observed the class and interviewed a member of the
discourse community and told me (Jose Reyes, October 20, 2014) A mechanism we use
to intercommunicate among each other is through Power Point because we communicate
through discussion from the slides she shows us. For what mechanisms they use to
primarily to provide information and feedback he said We use Black Board as a
mechanism to provide information and feedback because its where she puts the
instructions for the assignments and projects and where she gives us feedback on how
well we did. For swales fourth characteristic, a discourse community utilizes and hence
possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. I asked the
professor this question and she told me that they cover everything that has to do with the
human body from the bone all to the tendons such as Orthopedics. For finding this
discourse community lexis, I observed the class and found out they just use medical
terminology as there preferred language. For the sixth characteristic I was able to tell
apart from the people who were the newcomers and the expertise. I found that the trend
with the newcomers was that they were all on their phone dont paying attention or
socializing in their little groups. For the expertise they were the ones that took notes and
interacted with the professor with her power points.
For my second incorporation from my readings I used Kain and Wardles Activity
theory and the purpose of an activity theory was to study people engage in all kinds
activities from learning at a university. Since my discourse community was at a
university I used this method to help me understand the relationships among people

Discourse Community Ethnography

participating in activities, the tools they use to accomplish their activities, the goals set
for these activities and how social forces shape the way people participate in activities.
From my observation of the class all they did was go over chapters from there textbook
and then the professor did demonstrations based on the chapter of textbook which was
about the hips, quads, thigh and knee injures. I found that relationship among the people
was solid to a way that they all connected with the demonstrations the professor did and
one of them was on how to correctly tape someones knee and how to reinforce it to with
stand one engaging in a physical activity. The tools they used to perform different
activities was from observation and from the images on the power point. The goals from
these activities was to primary show how to tape up a specific injures and how strength
that specific part of the body. The way social forces shape the way people participate is
that they dont pay attention whats going on in the class because they are distracted
when on social media and have no participation to whats happening in class.

From my observation and analyze of the professor while she was lecturing I used
Aristotles ethos, logos and pathos as my third incorporation for my ethnography. For
ethos which means convincing by the character or credibility, I studied the professor how
she demonstrated how to tape someone knee and she made a argument how a lot of
therapists dont know how properly tape a knee and reinforce it the correct way. She did
it with confidence and the students in the class gave her the credibility in a impression
that she was worth watching. Pathos means persuading by appealing to the audiences
emotions. For pathos the professor told stories about major injuries she had to deal with
and one of them as about a game that UTEP played in Hawaii and one of players
dislocated their hip and another one about how a female basketball player tore her ACL

Discourse Community Ethnography

and how she help here recover from the injure. These stories relate to pathos because
these stories helped her win the classes emotional appeal and help her enhance the
argument that she knows what shes doing. Logos means persuading by the use of
reasoning. For logos she made comparisons with therapists and athletic trainers in her
lecture. She also made a reference to my generation on how were so venerable preexisting injures because were lazy to when it comes to rehab and stretching.

Conclusion
Before this assignment I didnt know what a discourse community was. I learned a lot
about the nature of communication, and the extent to which the community does or does
not qualify as a discourse community. Swales and his six characteristics of discourse
community helped me understand what a discourse community is perfectly and what
qualifications it needs to be called a discourse community. Kain and Wardles activity
theory helped when I observed the class, to see their relationships among each other
during activities, the tools they used to complete there activities and how social forces
play an effect on an activity. Aristotles ethos, pathos, and logos helped me to
understanding the persuasion the professor used to win the interest of the students as she
went through her lecture. Kain and Wardles activity theory, and Aristotle concept of
persuasion could be the two concepts that could help me in the future as in learning how
to observe, analyze a group of people and persuasion could help when I have to sell my
self to people and gain there respect and interest in me.

Discourse Community Ethnography

References

Swales, J. (1990). The concept of discourse community. In Downs and Wardle (Eds.),
Writing about writing (p. 466-479). Boston, MA: Bedford-St. Martins.
Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle. Activity Theory: An Introduction for the Writing
Classroom. In Downs and Wardle (Eds.), Writing about writing (p.273-83)
Aristotle. (350 B.C.E). Rhetoric. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html