Yulissa Montes

02/15/17
RWS 1301
Discourse Community

In simple terms a discourse community can be defined as a setting where members of the

community share a common set of goals. According to renowned author John Swales a discourse

community can be defined as, Use of the term 'discourse community' testifies to the

increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by

communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups (Swales, 1990). However, in order

for a discourse community to be considered true it must meet six defying characteristics. The

discourse community that will be discussed is working as a teaching assistant for the course Intro

to Electrical and Computer Engineering. It will also be discussed how this specific discourse

community can be considered to be two separate communities, as well as how this community

meets all of the six requirements for a community to be considered a discourse community.

Being a teaching assistant for the Intro to Electrical and Computer Engineering course

and previously being a student for this course, I am able to analyze this community daily. This

course focuses on teaching students about basic biomedical circuitry as well as basic engineering

concepts needed for later courses. This discourse community consists of students, teaching

assistants and the professor. However, this course can be broken down to two discourse

communities in itself, one where the students are just members and the other where just

including the teaching assistants. The members of these communities all have certain roles. The

students role is to understand the concepts provided, as well as to do the labs required and

reflect their experience on lab reports. The teaching assistants role is to help the students with

whatever they need as well as to assure that the students succeed in the course. The professors

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role is to teach the students about the topics before the students go to the lab to actually apply

these new concepts.

Literature Review

According to John Swales a discourse community needs to have six different

characteristics. The first is for the community to share a common goal set. The second is that

they have intercommunity methods amongst themselves. Third, they have participatory methods

in order for them to provide feedback to each other. Fourth, they have certain genres that only

pertain to their specific community. Firth, they have a specific lexis that only members of this

community would be able to understand. Lastly the sixth requirement is that the members have

some experience or degree for the content discussed in the community. The reason these

characteristics where established are explained by Swales, it is better to offer a set of criteria

sufficiency narrow that it will eliminate many of the marginal, blurred and controversial

contenders, (Swales, 1990). However, all six characteristics are to be expressed in the form

where the communication of this community be furthered. According to Miles Littles Article

Discourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience, Membership is determined by our

engagement with the relevant discourse, and with the concepts that act as tokens of more

complex groups of ideas,(Little, 2003). This comes to show that discourse communities actually

have purpose in their means, members are there because they enjoy the engagements in the

community.

Discussion

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 The first characteristic that defies a discourse community is that the members of the

group share a common interest. Working as a teaching assistant or being a student for the Intro to

Electrical and Computer Engineering course puts two separate discourse communities into one,

they are both similar as well as different. From the teaching assistant perspective, the common

goal is to help students understand the course material as well as to assist them in any way

possible in order to guarantee their success in the course. Roberto Martinez, a current graduate

student working as a teaching assistant said, my goal is to establish integrity amongst students

while at the same time promoting a hard working yet fun environment for freshmen engineering

students to learn basic engineering concepts, (personal communication, February 17, 2017).

However, as a student point of view, the goal is to pass the course and understand the material as

well as learn how to apply it in their future courses. Although these goals are different from one

another, the share the overall common goal of wanting to pursue success in the course.

Secondly, the community must be able to use various means of communication in order

to inform and interact with one another. The discourse community made up of the teaching

assistants uses various ways to communicate. The communication mainly comes from the

professor in charge of overlooking this course, Dr. Stella Quinones. She emails us information

that she would like us to communicate to the students, we then verbally communicate it to the

students. There are also other means to communicate using online websites such as email,

Piazza, and Thinkscape. As Roberto Martinez said, the use of Thinkscape is used as a form to

deliver students step by step instructions on how to complete their lab modules, (personal

communication, February 17, 2017). Communication is very important in order to guarantee the

students success as well as the teaching assistants success. Without these means of

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communication, then neither students nor teaching assistants would succeed in pursuing their

desired goals because there would not be any way to interact and inform.

Another requirement for a discourse community is that the members of the group must

use mechanisms to provide feedback. Teaching assistants provide feedback in person, we help

one another by providing constructive criticism as well as giving each other advice as to how to

explain harder concepts to students in order for them to grasp it better. Students provide feedback

through the completion of reports after every lab, this allows the teaching assistants to guide

them and provide them feedback on their performance that way they have room for

improvement. Students however also provide feedback amongst themselves. Students are given

an extra week to complete their first lab report because they are given the opportunity to

participate in a writing workshop. In this workshop, students grade their peers reports. After the

session, the students are given the opportunity to give one another feedback on their

performance. The additional week is given so that students have that time to reflect and make

adjustments to their reports. However, the primary way teaching assistants and students provide

feedback is in person, students help one another as well as how the teaching assistants help the

students.

Genres are an essential characteristic that defies a discourse community, especially the

genres that are utilized to communicate. Genre can articulate the operations of the discourse

community. These particular discourse communities use lab reports written in IEEE format,

which stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. As a student, you are required

to write lab reports, as a reiteration from before, in order to communicate to the teaching

assistants that grade these reports. The point of writing these reports is to communicate to your

TA that you are fully understanding the rather hard labs you are required to perform. Once the

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TAs grade these reports the results are given to Dr. Quinones for her to interpret the information

that students are having trouble grasping from the modules. She then reiterates this

misunderstood information during the students lecture. These reports are the way the

communication works throughout this course, from the students, to the teaching assistants, to the

professor in charge.

Aside from certain genres, this course has its own specific lexis. Students are required to

become familiar with several engineering terms in order to understand the material given.

Teaching assistants are required to speak in this certain lexis to the students. Outsiders would not

be able to understand the lexis unless they have a background in engineering. An example of the

lexis used would be, Measure the voltage drop across the 121-ohm resistor and the 21 Farad

capacitor connected as a second order roll off, after doing so plot a bode plot in MATLAB.

Outsiders would not understand this lexis because it deals with terms like voltage, current,

inductors, capacitors, bode plots, resistance, etc. Not only does the lexis include technical terms

but it also includes the terms of the specific chips and sensors that are used in labs, such as

potentiometer, operational amplifier, AND gate, strain gauge etc. The lexis is very professional

and is always kept that way, between the students and the teaching assistants.

The final characteristic of a discourse community is the threshold level off members.

What this means is that only certain individuals can be a part of this discourse community. The

students are required to have several pre-requisite courses before being able to enroll in this

course. The students must have taken and passed Calculus I and must be taking Introductory to

Mechanics as a co-requisite course. The teaching assistants must have a strong background in

engineering, however the new teaching assistants like me and another individual were hired

because of their performance during this introductory course.

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 Based on this discussion, we are able to conclude that the Introductory course to

Electrical and Computer Engineering is indeed considered to be a discourse community. It meets

all six of the defying characteristics, and it is considered to be two discourse communities in

itself. However not only does this community meet all of John Swales requirements, it also

meets Miles Littles definition. Discourse communities are essential to our lives. They help us to

create our identities, and they give us a sense of belonging and of having a mode of speaking in

common with others, (Miles, 2003). This comes to show beyond more than we were able to

analyze about this community and other discourse communities out there. Discourse

communities are a way for a group of individuals to come together to reach a specific goal

thorough means of communication. In this case the goal is for the students to become successful.

References

Swales, J. (1990). The concept of discourse community. In E. Wardle & D. Downs (Eds.),

Writing about writing: A college reader (p. 212-227). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.

Little, Miles, Emma Jordans, and Jane Sayers. "Sign In: Registered Users." Discourse

Communities and the Discourse of Experience - Jul 21, 2016. N.p., n.d.

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