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Running Head: Discourse Community Ethnography

Deni Ramirez
Professor Chowaing
RWS 1301
9 September 2016

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Discourse Community Ethnography

Discourse community
According to John Swales (1990), a community has to fulfill certain characteristic to
be considered a discourse community. In a Discourse community people share common
goals, they have intercommunication, participation, genres, lexis, and expertise. A
Discourse community is a group of people sharing common interests and they work
together for their purposes. Discourse communities exist all around the world in different
places or there can even be different discourse communities at the same place. There are
many types of communities but not all of them classify as a discourse community, for the
reason that not all communities are the same. One discourse community that achieves all
these characteristics is the Rotary Club which is a worldwide organization.
Rotary club is an organization in which people do community services such as give
to the needy, help in orphanages, cleaning steers and other services. There are some of this
clubs in Mexico and The United States, they have different leaders and different activities
but both have the same purpose. These clubs are different depending on the ages of their
members, the Rotary club is for adults and interact club is for adolescents, and still Rotary
and interact clubs are part of the Rotary club organization. In El Paso Texas there is the
Camino Real Rotary Club who is in charge of the interact clubs that are in El Paso, such as
the interact club at Lydia Patterson Institute.
Lydia Pattersons interact club focuses its service both in El Paso and Juarez city, as
its members come from both of the cities. As I happened to be part of this community when
I was a Lydia Patterson student, I know how this club works and their way of programming

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their schedule. When planning an activity, the leader of the club needs to be organized
because people who live in Juarez need to cross the bridge and sometimes even walk to the
reunion point. I used to do that all the time because I live in Juarez and I have to cross the
bridge to go to meetings in El Paso. It is difficult to be doing every time but it is necessary.
To continue their activities as any other groups, it needs money to do their activities
and services. There are many different ways in which the club obtains it. One way is by
donations given by companies to the rotary club and by activities where they obtain the
money. The activities where the rotary club obtains money are set by the board and these
activities are discussed in the meetings. Most of the time the activities are simple as to sell
things as chocolates or tickets for the movies. The activities are small because the members
of the interact club are adolescents and they cant do bigger activities to obtain money.
In the Concept of Discourse Community by John Swales, he debates what a
discourse community is and how it is not a speech community. Swales refers to
Bloomfields (1933) form of speech community: seen as being composed of those who
share similar linguistic rules (The Concept of Discourse Community, pg.470). A speech
community is composed only of people with similar linguistic rules or people who share
rules to be more efficient. A discourse community consists of a group of people who link
up in order to pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity (John
Swales, The concept of discourse community pg.471). Swales in his discourse community,
he quotes other writers through his writing and by analyzing them he got to his conclusion
of the six defining characteristics for a discourse community. John Swales stated that
speech communities are centripetal, and discourse communities are centrifugal. A

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centripetal unites people through a common form of communication. A centrifugal creates
a rupture in communication, conflict can easily begin due to a lack of communication.
Gee defines Discourse community as forms of life which integrate words, acts,
values, beliefs, and attitudes (pg. 6). As I read about James Paul Gee he characterizes
discourse community. Gee changes primary discourse, not by just follow your guide and do
what he says but to be a member of a primary socializing group (pg. 8) such as a family,
clan, peer or a group. Gee likes to call his initial discourse as primary discourse which is
the one we use to make sense of the words to interact with others. It is important to realize
that tension or conflict is present between a member of a discourse community. Gee gives
us the reason of this, is because they feel a conflict between certain standard academic
discourse such as tradition or any criticism.
Interact club is a discourse community because it includes the aspects that have
been exposed to you through this research. Interact club is an organization with a common
goal that is to help the community by services. These services are commonly coordinated
by the group with meetings in which communication is important. The group talks about
the activities in their once a week meeting and through a Facebook page. In their meetings
the members have to contribute with 50 cents, also interact members had to attend to the
services. Interact clubs are focused on helping others and at the meetings they talk about
how the next activity will get done. The clubs quote is service above yourself, to help
others before you as Jaqueline Guerrero said in the interview. As in any community, there
are members with more experience and there are people joining. When people start to join
the club they start to get experience but with that experience comes the problems.

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Issues exist everywhere but mostly in communities because people have different
ways of thinking and doing things and this causes conflicts. As I wrote before in Gee's
view, tension or conflict is present between members of a discourse community and in
interact clubs, there is a lot of conflicts when it comes to communication. Members of the
interact club have different ways of communication as I had already said but still they have
issues about that. Their main issue is that no matter how much communication they have
they still cant carry out their activities. This is for the reason that not all the members
checked the Facebook page or assisted the meetings.
As Gee said the conflict between certain standard in academic discourse such as
tradition or any criticism made problems in any discourse group. Rotary Club needs to
start making changes before such problems about miss communication affects them. They
need to create a group chat in any of a famous social media without the need to go to
meetings and yet still know their responsibilities of the event that is coming up. A discourse
community is the way of living, despite many research papers about this topic research is
needed to develop an accurate meaning about what a discourse community is. Concluding
about discourse community, our main concern is whether or not the Rotary Club qualifies
as a discourse community? Indeed, with swales six discourse community characteristics,
we can relate that Rotary Club as any other clubs are a discourse community.

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Reference
Swales, John. ''The Concept of Discourse Community." Genre Analysis: English in
Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.21-32. Print.
https://eng1301-knous.wikispaces.com/file/view/Swales-11.pdf
Gee, J.P. (1989). Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: introduction. Journal of
education, volume 171(1989).
http://jamespaulgee.com/geeimg/pdfs/Literacy%20and%20Linguistics.pdf
Krumweide, Hurtado. (2010). Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces.
http://www.lewishistoricalsociety.com/wiki/tikiprint_article.php?articleId=146
Jaqueline Guerrero, personal communication, September 9, 2016