Discourse Community: Swales' Basic Criteria

A discourse community is composed of a group of experts and a large number of apprentice members (Johns, 1990; Swales, 1990), who, while being involved and participating in this membership, will acquire knowledge and achieve an expert level. (Herzberg, 1986)
But, what special characteristics must a discourse community have? Is any group of experts a discourse community? Swales (1990) answered these questions by recognizing some basic criteria, which serves to test any community and decide whether the group of people belongs to a discourse community or not.
Swales’ (1990) basic criteria points out that a discourse community should share specific interests or goals. Aims are various, for example the purposes of a course for teachers is to provide teachers with the confidence to connect their actions in the classrooms to research – informed practices and to make them aware of the importance of a collaborative culture (Mclaughin &Talbert, 1993; Regan-Smith, 1994), in other words, learn from one another.
The second and third aspects that a community must share are a participatory mechanism and information exchange. In UCLA community, where a scholarship of teachers is sought, the publication and research as well as the engagement in sharing and applying information are crucial mechanism for the acquisition of the goal. This community defines publications as the main genre, or the community specific genre, which is the fourth aspect that Swales (1990) presents.
As regards the fifth and sixth aspects, members should use highly specialized terminology, what shows their high general level of expertise. Firstly, as it is explained in the open memo to Community College Faculty and Administrators (Community College Review, Summer, 2001 by Christine Kelly-Kleese), the community college adopts language that has been given particular meaning within the larger higher education community. For example, the term “nontraditional” is used to describe students, but students who are deemed nontraditional in universities are traditional in community college settings. Secondly, it is clear teachers involve in the process of reflection, must a achieve e level of expertness.
Finally, as it was mentioned in the very beginning, a discourse community is a group of people. However, not any group of people is a discourse community. Swales (1990) mentioned a group of aspects or basic criteria that a discourse community should share in order to be so.
References:
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.