John swales, a professor of linguistics defines the term “discourse community” in such a particular way. He believes that a discourse community is any group of people who share a set of goals and have come up with different ways of communicating about the said goals. These individuals generally use communication in order to achieve their goals. They usually have some unique forms of communication. Throughout the said communications, some particular lexis is used in description of anything in the discourse community. According to swales, the discourse communities have various genres, and even comprise of some reasonable ration of some experienced and novice members. Swales goes on to stress that “any particular discourse community should have a threshold level of its members with some sustainable degree of some relevant content including discoursal expertise” (473). Although these requirements may seem as such a large criteria to meet, thousands of discourse communities exist, and any average citizen is involved in several of them. For this study the discourse community that greatly interests me is the soccer team.
Swales’ Six Characteristics of a Discourse Community
As mentioned above, this paper intends to analyze my chosen discourse community through some careful comparisons between a soccer team and the Swales’ six characteristics. As swales suggests, any discourse community can be meticulously be defined by the use of the “characteristic checklist”, that have been used in this study. By moving step by step into each characteristic, it becomes quite easy to define any particular community as a discourse community.
Goals
Despite the fact that a soccer team may seem to be a simple form of a discourse community, it can be seen to observe all the swales’ criteria. Swales gets to discuss that a powerful component of a discourse community is ensuring that the community’s members agree upon a set of common goals. This is quite evident in the soccer game as all the members usually have a shared goal of getting to win a particular match by scoring goals. There are no real timeouts and very little stoppage of the game so communication with the soccer coaches is usually very limited. Swales states that any discourse community should have a broadly agreed set of goals. This is usually evident in soccer as the members of the team usually strive to score goals and prevent the other team from scoring the said. As soon as the members of a particular team lose the possession of a ball to the opponents, the team goes on to switch their goal to the defensive mentality. This means that every player in the team must know how to communicate with each other without necessarily having to talk verbally.
Any soccer community has different mechanisms that they use to achieve their goals. Every member of a team is usually assigned some different duties during a game in order to ensure that everyone contributes to their agreed goal. Every member in the field is usually there with the aim of winning and so every little mistake from any member can turn into a win for the opponent.
Mechanism of communication
The soccer team usually gets to communicate through some organized hierarchy of intercommunication mechanism. Primarily, the soccer teams usually communicate to its team members about some upcoming events or even the meeting dates through the use of email, text messages and phone calls. The use of email is the most preferred mode of communication because they get to allow some concise and clear messages that can be re-read, and also have an option of replying to the messages compared to other modes such as flyers that cannot be replied to.
The team also gets to communicate with its fans and supporters through the use of media such as the newspapers, magazines, television, radio, fliers, posters and billboards. This usually allows the supporters to now of the upcoming events, games and even any other updates about the team that the team leaders feel necessary.
Purpose of each mechanism of communications
The main purpose of each mechanism of communication is to make sure that every member of the discourse community is up to date with the ongoing of the team. This way, the team members do not get to miss deadlines or important meetings. The team also ensures communication with the supporters in order to update them of the coming matches. Due to this there gets to be many supporters who buy the tickets for the game, leading the discourse community to have money for the upkeep of their team members.
Modes of communication that can be considered genre
Soccer is usually linked to many people in the community, but usually gets to focus on the group of people who enjoy watching and playing the sport. The mode of communication used by the discourse community that can be considered genre is the use of magazines because only the interested parties get to buy the soccer magazines. The team members and supporters also get to understand of the recurring information without having to look for the beginning of some particular issue.
Lexis
There are different forms of language use d by the group members especially during a particular match that can be seen as lexis. The most common lexis used during the match is such things as “Drop” that signifies that the player should pass the ball backwards towards their own goals. “Ball” means that the player should pass the ball to the other player, and “Square” is used when another team member is running next to you and asks you to pass the ball towards him.
Expertise
Swales determined that any discourse community should have at least some few members who have a particular level of knowledge and expertise regarding the organization and that the majority of the remaining members should be novices. For this particular team the most senior members are the captain and the coach, while the rest are the novices.
Conclusion
In conclusion, swales definition of the discourse community through his six characteristics helps in giving evidence that a soccer team is an ideal discourse community. Through the comparison of the soccer team to the requirement of the goals, mechanisms of communication, use of genre, lexis and expertise, it is clear that the soccer community of my interest can clearly be defined as swales discourse community.
Works CitedSwales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print.
