3 Wikipedia: Discourse Communities
Discourse communities are studied in the larger field of genre analysis*. Related terms include Miller’s “rhetorical community”[1] and, focusing on the communication rather than the community, Yates & Orlikowski’s “genres of organizational communication”[2]
Regarding contemporary rhetorical communities, Zappen, et al., stated, “Thus a contemporary rhetorical community is less a collection of people joined by shared beliefs and values than a public space or forum that permits these people to engage each other and form limited or local communities of belief.”[3]Incorporating this factor suggests an introduction to a democratic system in discourse communities and has also been educationally termed “Accountable Talk” by researchers,[4] indicating the diversity of communities.[5]
The term discourse community started to lose favor among scholars in the early 2000s, with community of practice** being used in place of discourse community. Swales suggested that discourse communities have shared goals, yet academic communities do not have meaningful shared goals.[6] The term discourse community is not yet well defined, which raises questions that could be the cause of the term’s fall from favor.[7]
*Genre studies is an academic subject which studies genre theory as a branch of general critical theory in several different fields, including art, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies.
**A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who “share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.[1] The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger 1991). Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998).
- Miller, Carolyn R. "Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre." Genre and the new rhetoric (1994): 67–78. ↵
- JoAnne Yates and Wanda J. Orlikowski. "Genres of organizational communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media." Academy of Management Review 17.2 (1992): 299–326. ↵
- Zappen, James P., Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina. "Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace." Rhetoric Review 1997: 400. JSTOR Journals. Web. 10 Oct. 2015. ↵
- Ardasheva, Yuliya; Howell, Penny B.; Magaña Margarita, Vidrio (September 2016). "Accessing the Classroom Discourse Community Through Accountable Talk: English Learners' Voices". TESOL Journal. 7 (3): 667–99. doi:10.1002/tesj.237. ISSN 1949-3533. Retrieved 18 January 2017. ↵
- Vadacs, Bea (April 2011). "Banal Nationalism, Football, and Discourse Community in Africa" (Print/web). Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. 11 (1): 25–41. doi:10.1111/j.1754-9469.2011.01105.x. Retrieved 18 January 2017. ↵
- Borg, Erik. Discourse communities (ELT Journal 57:4) ↵
- Swales, John (2011). "The Concept of Discourse Community" (PDF). In Wardle, Elizabeth; Downs, Doug (eds.). Writing About Writing: A College Reader. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's. pp. 215–227. ISBN 978-1-4576-3694-3. ↵
Genre studies is an academic subject which studies genre theory as a branch of general critical theory in several different fields, including art, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger 1991). Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998).
