Gabriela Gonzalez

RWS 1301- 16107

10/10/2015
Discourse Communities Ethnography
Discourse communities are present in our daily lives like at our jobs, within our families,
and clubs we may be a part of. To give an insight into the concept of discourse communities I
have observed and collected data from two different discourse communities to answer my
question of, how effective is the communication in these communities when meeting their
goals? The communities I decided to observe were my political science class and a Sonic DriveIn where I used to work.
There are two articles that give the understanding of what discourse community means.
The first article, The Concept of Discourse Community by John Swales, describes a discourse
community as being defined by certain characteristics such as a common public goal, specialized
language known as lexis, a means of communicating to everyone in the group, and uses different
genres when communicating. These are some of the characteristics that will be found in the two
discourse communities I collected data from. The second article Learning to Serve: The
Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers by Tony Mirabelli, involves the idea of
multiliteracies which means that in discourse communities they can use more than one form of
literacy. This is an important concept because it will be heavily present at the Sonic Drive-In I
chose to observe because the way they communicate is different from what you would normally
see in other places.
At the first site, Sonic Drive-In in Lubbock, the common goal that every employee and
manager have is to make sure orders go out on time and that they are done right, you could call
this their exigence. There are different people working together to make sure they meet this goal
and they are the cooks, managers, carhops which are the servers, and the fountains which are the

Gabriela Gonzalez
RWS 1301- 16107
10/10/2015
persons who make the drinks. There is a lexis that is used by the employees that contain such
words a drop and see op. In this context a drop is when the managers collect the money
the carhops have accumulated during their shift, and a see op is when a customer has a special
request that there happens to not be a button for what they asked so it must be verbally told to
whomever it applies to. The employees utilize different genres for communication which happen
to be the box, the ticket, and face-to-face training. The box is the computer on which an
employee takes a customers order on. The person that is taking a customers order has to
understand exactly how to input that information into the box and what each of the buttons mean.
The employee also has to know that there is a certain order when inputting that information. For
example, the person taking the order hears the customer say yes, can I get a large sour
watermelon nerd slush you expect to be put into the box the same way you hear it, but instead
you have to push the buttons in the order of size, Slush, flavor, Add Nerds, and then Sour
Shot. After this it is the fountain that also has to understand a specialized language in order to
read what they have to make. For the person making the drinks a screen will let them know what
they have to make and how much time they have to make it in. On the screen, using the example
from before, the order will come up as L SLSH (then below that) +WTRMLN, +NERDS,
+SOUR. The order then prints out on a ticket which then is the responsibility of the carhop to
interpret what the ticket says so that the right order is taken out to the customer. Also, the cooks
have to know how to read their screen and know what all the acronyms mean to make the right
food. This is all a complex system of communicating from one area to another to help achieve
the goals of the group; these tools that they use are examples of multiliteracies.

Gabriela Gonzalez
RWS 1301- 16107
10/10/2015
At the second site, Political Science 2310, the common goal shared between the professor
and the students is to become more aware of the role of our government concerning our freedoms
so that we can make more informed decisions on who should lead us. There are two types of
genres used in this class which are face-to-face communication and the materials required for the
class that happens to be a book. The means of communication in class are question an answer
mostly but there are also class discussions. Group discussions usually involve questions over
what wasnt understood in the book, discuss current events, and lecture. During current events
and lecture there is more interaction among students instead of the students with the professor
alone. There is certain lexis that only the students and professor would know, words like
politics, liberals, and conservatives. Although these works are commonly used they mean
something different in this class for example, politics means how we reconcile our differences. If
someone were to walk randomly into this class they would be lost in lecture when these terms
were being used since they arent part of the group that knows what they mean. This is how one
can distinguish who is and isnt part of the group.
There are obvious differences between these two communities concerning
communication, but there are some subtle similarities on how they communicate. A similarity is
that their communication is very effective when meeting their goals. In each group that I
observed there seemed to be an effort made by everyone in the group to communicate effectively
in order to achieve their goals. On the other hand the way they communicate is vastly different.
At Sonic they use a complex system to communicate to each other on how what needs to get
done. In the political science class they use a more traditional way to communicate to one
another that still functions to accomplish their goals.

Gabriela Gonzalez
RWS 1301- 16107
10/10/2015
Conducting this research really helped me understand what makes a discourse
community and how it functions. Each of these communities is, or was, a part of my daily life
and I had no idea they were discourse communities. Also, I had no idea that the job I believed to
be so easy and simple was actually very complex, especially on the way we communicated with
one another to make sure we were getting our job done. To sum it up, this project made me see
how there are all sorts of different discourse communities and how we take part in them all the
time.