The concept of discourse community

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20 Genre analysis – setting the scene
those distant ideas are not merely distant in space and time, but equally
likely to be occurring in the department next door, and as the encasements are presumably realized in preferred rhetorical and linguistic
choices, the genre-based approach proposed in this volume can hope, at
least, for some enlightenment from the world’s most charismatic cultural
anthropologist.
PART II KEY CONCEPTS
2 The concept of discourse
community
2.1 A need for clarification
Discourse community, the first of three terms to be examined in Part II,
has so far been principally appropriated by instructors and researchers
adopting a ‘Social View’ (Faigley, 1986) of the writing process. Although
I am not aware of the original provenance of the term itself, formative
influences can be traced to several of the leading ‘relativist’ or ‘social
constructionist’ thinkers of our time. Herzberg (1986) instances Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric (1969), Kuhn’s The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) and Fish’s Is There a Text in
this Class? (1980). Porter (1988) discusses the significance of Foucault’s
analysis of ‘discursive formations’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1972); other contributors are Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature, 1979) and Geertz (Local Knowledge, 1983), with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1958) as an earlier antecedent
(Bruffee, 1986), particularly perhaps for the commentary therein on
‘language games’ (3.5).
Whatever the genealogy of the term discourse community, the relevant
point in the present context is that it has been appropriated by the ‘social
perspectivists’ for their variously applied purposes in writing research. It
is this use that I wish to explore and in turn appropriate. Herzberg ( 1986)
sets the scene as follows:
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. The pedagogies associated with writing across the
curriculum and academic English now use the notion of ‘discourse
communities’ to signify a cluster of ideas: that language use in a
group is a form of social behavior, that discourse is a means of
maintaining and extending the group’s knowledge and of initiating
new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic or
constitutive of the group’s knowledge.
(Herzberg, 1986,1)
21
22 The concept of discourse community
Irrespective of the merits of this ‘cluster of ideas’, the cluster is, I suggest,
consequential of the assumption that there are indeed entities identifiable
as discourse communities, not criteria/ for establishing or identifying
them. They point us towards asking how a particular discourse community uses its discoursal conventions to initiate new members or how
the discourse of another reifies particular values or beliefs. While such
questions are well worth asking, they do not directly assist with the
logically prior ones of how we recognize such communities in the first
place.
Herzberg in fact concedes that there may be a definitional problem:
‘The idea of “discourse community” is not well defined as yet, but like
many imperfectly defined terms, it is suggestive, the center of a set of ideas
rather than the sign of a settled notion’ (1986:1). However, if discourse
community is to be ‘the center of a set of ideas’ – as it is in this book-then
it becomes reasonable to expect it to be, if not a settled notion, at least
one that is sufficiently explicit for others to be able to accept, modify or
reject on the basis of the criteria proposed.
Several other proponents of the ‘social view’, while believing that
discourse community is a powerful and useful concept, recognize it
currently raises as many questions as it answers. Porter (1988:2), for
instance, puts one set of problems with exemplary conciseness: ‘Should
discourse communities be determined by shared objects of study, by
common research methodology, by opportunity and frequency of communication, or by genre and stylistic conventions?’ Fennell et al. (1987)
note that current definitions have considerable vagueness and in consequence offer little guidance in identifying discourse communities. They
further point out that definitions which emphasize the reciprocity of
‘discourse’ and ‘community’ (community involves discourse and discourse involves community) suffer the uncomfortable fate of ending up
circular.
We need then to clarify, for procedural purposes, what is to be
understood by discourse community and, perhaps in the present circumstances, it is better to offer a set of criteria sufficiently narrow that it
will eliminate many of the marginal, blurred and controversial contenders. A ‘strong’ list of criteria will also avoid the circularity problem,
because in consequence it will certainly follow that not all communities –
as defined on other criteria – will be discourse communities, just as it will
follow that not all discourse activity is relevant to discourse community
consolidation. An exclusionary list will also presumably show that the
kind of disjunctive question raised by Porter is misplaced. It is likely to
show that neither shared object of study nor common procedure nor
interaction nor agreed discoursal convention will themselves individually
be necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of a discourse
community, although a combination of some or all might. Conversely,
Speech communities and discourse communities 23
the absence of any one (different subject areas, conflicting procedures, no
interaction, and multiple discourse conventions) may be enough to
prevent discourse community formation – as international politics
frequently reminds us.
It is possible, of course, that there is no pressing need to clarify the
concept of discourse community because, at the end of the account, it will
turn out to be nothing more than composition specialists’ convenient
translation of the long-established concept of speech community
common to sociolinguistics and central to the ethnography of communication. This view, for example, would seem to be the position of Freed
and Broadhead (1987). After a couple of opening paragraphs on speech
community in linguistics and on audience analysis, they observe, ‘only
recently have compositional studies begun to investigate communities of
writers and readers, though the terminology seems to be changing to
“discourse communities” in order to signal the focus on the written
rather than the spoken’ (1987:154). Whether it is appropriate to identify
discourse community with a subset of speech community is the topic of
the next section.
2.2 Speech communities and discourse communities
Speech community has been an evolving concept in sociolinguistics and
the consequent variety of definitional criteria has been discussed –
among others- by Hudson (1980), Saville-Troike (1982) and especially
by Braithwaite (1984). At the outset, a speech community was seen as
being composed of those who share similar linguistic rules (Bloomfield,
1933 ), and in those terms we could legitimately refer to, say, the speech
community of the English-speaking world. Later, Labov will emphasize
‘shared norms’ rather than shared performance characteristics but still
conclude that ‘New York City is a single speech community, and not a
collection of speakers living side by side, borrowing occasionally from
each other’s dialects’ (Labov, 1966:7). Others, such as Fishman (1971),
have taken as criteria! patterned regularities in the use of language. In
consequence, a speech community is seen as being composed of those
who share functional rules that determine the appropriacy of utterances. Finally, there are those such as Hymes who argue for multiple
criteria:
A speech community is defined, then, tautologically but radically,
as a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and
interpretation of speech. Such sharing comprises knowledge of at
least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use.
Both conditions are necessary.
(Hymes, 1974,51)
24 The concept of discourse community
There are a number of reasons why I believe even a tight definition of
speech community (shared linguistic forms, shared regulative rules and
shared cultural concepts) will not result in making an alternative definition of discourse community unnecessary. The first is concerned with
medium; not so much in the trivial sense that ‘speech’ just will not do as
an exclusive modifier of communities that are often heavily engaged in
writing, but rather in terms of what that literary activity implies. Literacy
takes away locality and parochiality, for members are more likely to
communicate with other members in distant places, and are more likely
to react and respond to writings rather than speech from the past.
A second reason for separating the two concepts derives from the need
to distinguish a sociolinguistic grouping from a sociorhetorical one. In a
sociolinguistic speech community, the communicative needs of the
group, such as socialization or group solidarity, tend to predominate in
the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics. The
primary determinants of linguistic behavior are social. However, in a
sociorhetorical discourse community, the primary determinants of
linguistic behavior are functional, since 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, even if these latter should
consequently occur. In a discourse community, the communicative needs
of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of
its discoursal characteristics.
Thirdly, in terms of the fabric of society, speech communities are
centripetal (they tend to absorb people into that general fabric), whereas
discourse communities are centrifugal (they tend to separate people into
occupational or speciality-interest groups). A speech community typically inherits its membership by birth, accident or adoption; a discourse
community recruits its members by persuasion, training or relevant
qualification. To borrow a term from the kind of association readers of
this book are likely to belong to, an archetypal discourse community
tends to be a Specific Interest Group.
2.3 A conceptualization of discourse community
I would now like to propose six defining characteristics that will be
necessary and sufficient for identifying a group of individuals as a
discourse community.
1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public
goals.
These public goals may be formally inscribed in documents (as is ofren
the case with associations and clubs), or they may be more tacit. The
A conceptualization of discourse community 25
goals are public, because spies may join speech and discourse communities for hidden purposes of subversion, while more ordinary people may
join organizations with private hopes of commercial or romantic
advancement. In some instances, but not in many, the goals may be high
level or abstract. In a Senate or Parliament there may well exist overtly
adversarial groups of members, but these adversaries may broadly share
some common objective as striving for improved government. In the
much more typical non-adversarial discm:rse communities, reduction in
the broad level of agreement may fall to a point where communication
breaks down and the discourse community splits. It is commonality of
goal, not shared object of study that is criteria], even if the former often
subsumes the latter. But not always. The fact that the shared object of
study is, say, the Vatican, does not imply that students of the Vatican in
history departments, the Kremlin, dioceses, birth control agencies and
liberation theology seminaries form a discourse community.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication
among its members.
The participatory mechanisms will vary according to the community:
meetings, telecommunications, correspondence, newsletters, conversations and so forth. This criterion is quite stringent because it produces a
negative answer to the case of ‘The Cafe Owner Problem’ (Najjar,
personal communication). In generalized form, the problem goes as
follows: individuals A, B, C and so on occupy the same professional roles
in life. They interact (in speech and writing) with the same clienteles; they
originate, receive and respond to the same kind of messages for the same
purposes; they have an approximately similar range of genre skills. And
yet, as cafe owners working long hours in their own establishments, and
not being members of the Local Chamber of Commerce, A, Band C never
interact with one another. Do they form a discourse community? We can
notice first that ‘The Cafe Owner Problem’ is not quite like those
situations where A, B and C operate as ‘point’. A, B and C may be
lighthouse keepers on their lonely rocks, or missionaries in their separate
jungles, or neglected consular officials in their rotting outposts. In all
these cases, although A, Band C may never interact, they all have lines of
communication back to base, and presumably acquired discourse community membership as a key element in their initial training.
Bizzell (1987) argues that the cafe owner kind of social group will be a
discourse community because ‘its members may share the social-classbased or ethnically-based discursive practices of people who are likely to
become cafe owners in their neighborhood’ (1987:5). However, even if
this sharing of discursive practice occurs, it does not resolve the logical
problem of assigning membership of a community to individuals who
neither admit nor recognize that such a community exists.
26 The concept of discourse community
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily
to provide information and feedback. . . . .
Thus, membership implies uptake of the mformanonal opportunmes.
Individuals might pay an annual subscription to the Acoustical Society of
America but if they never open any of its commumcat1ons they cannot be
said to belong to the discourse community, even though they are formally
members of the society. The secondary purposes of the mformanon
exchange will vary according to the common goals: to improve performance in a football squad or in an orchestra, to make money in a brokerage
house, to grow better roses in a gardening club, or to dent the research
front in an academic department.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more
genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
A discourse community has developed and continues to develop discoursal expectations. These may involve appropriacy of topics, the form,
function and positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles texts play
in the operation of the discourse community. In so far as ‘genres are how
things get done, when language is used to accomplish them’ (Martin,
1985:250), these discoursal expectations are created by the genres that
articulate the operations of the discourse community. One of the
purposes of this criterion is to question discourse community status for
new or newly-emergent groupings. Such groupings need, as it were, to
settle down and work out their communicative proceedings and practices
before they can be recognized as discourse communities. If a new
grouping ‘borrows’ genres from other discc;mrse communities, such
borrowings have to be assimilated.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired
some specific lexis.
This specialization may involve using lexical items known to the wider
speech communities in special and technical ways, as in information
technology discourse communities, or using highly technical terminology
as in medical communities. Most commonly, however, the inbuilt
dynamic towards an increasing] y shared and specialized terminology is
realized through the development of community-specific abbreviations
and acronyms. The use of these (ESL, EAP, WAC, NCTE, TOEFL, etc.)
is, of course, driven by the requirements for efficient communication
exchange between experts. It is hard to conceive, at least in the contemporary English-speaking world, of a group of well-established
members of a discourse community communicating among themselves
on topics relevant to the goals of the community and not using lexical
items puzzling to outsiders. It is hard to imagine attending perchance the
convention of some group of which one is an outsider and understanding every word. If it were to happen – as might occur in the inaugural
An example of a discourse community 27
meeting of some quite new grouping – then that grouping would not yet
constitute a discourse community.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a
suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.
Discourse communities have changing memberships; individuals enter as
apprentices and leave by death or in other less involuntary ways.
However, survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio
between novices and experts.
2.4 An example of a discourse community
As we have seen, those interested in discourse communities have typically
sited their discussions within academic contexts, thus possibly creating a
false impression that such communities are only to be associated with
intellectual paradigms or scholarly cliques. Therefore, for my principal
example of a discourse community, I have deliberately chosen one that is
not academic, but which nevertheless is probably typical enough of many
others. The discourse community is a hobby group and has an ‘umbrella
organization’ called the Hong Kong Study Circle, of which I happen to be
a member. The aims of the HKSC (note the abbreviation) are to foster
interest in and knowledge of the stamps of Hong Kong (the various
printings, etc.) and of their uses (postal rates, cancellations, etc.).
Currently there are about 320 members scattered across the world, but
with major concentrations in Great Britain, the USA and Hong Kong
itself and minor ones in Holland and Japan. Based on the membership
list, my guess is that about a third of the members are non-native speakers
of English and about a fifth women. The membership varies in other
ways: a few are rich and have acquired world-class collections of classic
rarities, but many are not and pursue their hobby interest with material
that costs very little to acquire. Some are ,
auctioneers and catalogue publishers, but most are collectors. From what
little I know, the collectors vary greatly in occupation. One standard
reference work was co-authored by a stamp dealer and a Dean at Yale;
another was written by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel. The greatest
authoriry on the nineteenth century carriage of Hong Kong mail, with
three books to his credit, has recently retired from a lifetime of service as
a signalman with British Rail. I mention these brief facts to show that the
members of the discourse community have, superficially at least, nothing
in common except their shared hobby interest, although Bizzell (forthcoming) is probably correct in pointing out that there may be psychological predispositions that attract particular people to collecting and make
them ‘kindred spirits’.
28 The concept of discourse community
The main mechanism, or ‘forum’ (Herrington, 1985) for intercommunication is a bi-monthly Journal and Newsletter, the latest to
arrive being No. 265. There are scheduled meetings, including an Annual
General Meeting, that takes place in London, but rarely more than a
dozen members attend. There is a certain amount of correspondence and
some phoning, but without the Journal/Newsletter I doubt the discourse
community would survive. The combined periodical often has a highly
interactive content as the following extracts show:
2. Hong Kong, Type 12, with Index
No one has yet produced another example of this c.d.s. that I
mentioned on J.256/7 as having been found with an index letter
‘C’ with its opening facing downwards, but Mr. Scamp reports
that he has seen one illustrated in an auction catalogue having a
normal ‘C’ and dated MY 9/59 (Type 12 is the 20 mm single-circle
broken in upper half by HONG KONG). lt must be in someone’s
collection!
3. The B.P.O.’s in Kobe and Nagasaki
Mr. Pullan disputes the statement at the top of J.257/3 that ‘If the
postal clerk had not violated regulations by affixing the MR 17/79
(HIOGO) datestamp on the front, we might have no example of
this c.d.s. at all.’ He states that ‘By 1879 it was normal practice for
the sorter’s datestamp to be struck on the front, the change from
the back of the cover occurring generally in 1877, though there are
isolated earlier examples’; thus there was no violation of
regulations.
My own early attempts to be a full member of the community were not
marked by success. Early on I published an article in the journal which
used a fairly complex frequency analysis of occurrence – derived from
Applied Linguistics – in order to offer an alternative explanation of a
puzzle well known to members of the HKSC. The only comments that
this effort to establish credibility elicited were ‘too clever by half’ and ‘Mr
Swales, we won’t change our minds without a chemical analysis’. I have
also had to learn over time the particular terms of approval and
disapproval for a philatelic item (cf. Becher, 1981) such as ‘significant’,
‘useful’, ‘normal’, and not to comment directly on the monetary value of
such items.
Apart from the conventions governing articles, queries and replies in
the Journal/Newsletter, the discourse community has developed a genrespecific set of conventions for describing items of Hong Kong postal
history. These occur in members’ collections, whether for display or not,
and are found in somewhat more abbreviated forms in specialized
auction catalogues, as in the following example:
1176 1899 Combination PPC to Europe franked CIP 4 C cane
large CANTON dollar chop, pair HK 2 C carmine added
& Hong Kong index Beds. Arr eds. (1) (Photo) HK $1500.
Remaining issues 29
Even if luck and skill were to combine to interpret PPC as ‘picture
postcard’, CIP as ‘Chinese Imperial Post’, a ‘combination’ as a postal
item legitimately combining the stamps of two or more nations and so on,
an outsider would still not be in a position to estimate whether 1500
Hong Kong dollars would be an appropriate sum to bid. However, the
distinction between insider and outsider is not absolute but consists of
gradations. A professional stamp dealer not dealing in Hong Kong
material would have a useful general schema, while a member of a very
similar discourse community, say the China Postal History Society, may
do as well as a member of the HKSC because of overlapping goals.
The discourse community I have discussed meets all six of the
proposed defining criteria: there are common goals, participatory
mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly
specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise. On the
other hand, distance between members geographically, ethnically and
socially presumably means that they do not form a speech community.
2.5 Remaining issues
If we now return to Herzberg’s ‘cluster of ideas’ quoted near the
beginning of this section, we can see that the first two (language use is a
form of social behaviour, and discourse maintains and extends a group’s
knowledge) accord with the conceptualization of discourse community
proposed here. The third is the claim that ‘discourse is epistemic or
constitutive of the group’s knowledge’ (Herzberg, 1986:1). This claim is
also advanced, although in slightly different form, in a forthcoming paper
by Bizzell:
In the absence of consensus, let me offer a tentative definition: a
‘discourse community’ is a group of people who share certain
language-using practices. These practices can be seen as conventionalized in two ways. Stylistic conventions regulate social
interactions both within the group and in its dealings with
outsiders: to this extent ‘discourse community’ borrows from the
sociolinguistic concept of ‘speech community’. Also, canonical
knowledge regulates the world-views of group members, how they
interpret experience; to this extent ‘discourse community’ borrows
from the literary~critical concept of ‘interpretive community’.
(Bizzell, forthcoming: 1)
The issue of whether a community’s discourse and its discoursal expectations are constitutive or regulative of world-view is a contemporary
reworking of the Whorfian hypothesis that each language possesses a
structure which must at some level influence the way its users view the
world (Carroll, 1956). The issue is an important one, because as Bizzell
30 The concept of discourse community
later observes ‘If we acknowledge that participating in a discourse
community entails some assimilation of its world view, then it becomes
difficult to maintain the position that discourse conventions can be
employed in a detached, instrumental way’ (Bizzell, forthcoming: 9).
However, this is precisely the position I wish to maintain, especially if
can be employed is interpreted as may sometimes be employed. There are
several reasons for this. First, it is possible to deny the premise that
participation entails assimilation. There are enough spies, undercover
agents and fifth columnists in the world to suggest that non-assimilation
is at least possible. Spies are only successful if they participate successfully
in the relevant speech and discourse communities of the domain which
they have infiltrated; however, if they also assimilate they cease to be
single spies but become double agents. On a less dramatic level, there is
enough pretense, deception and face-work around to suggest that the
acting out of roles is not that uncommon; and to take a relatively
innocuous context, a may pretend to be an active
and participating member of a bridge-playing community in order to
make a favorable impression on his .
Secondly, sketching the boundaries of discourse communities in ways
that I have attempted implies (a) that individuals may belong to several
discourse communities and (6) that individuals will vary in the number
of discourse communities they belong to and hence in the number of
genres they command. At one extreme there may be a sense of discourse
community deprivation – ‘Cooped up in the house with the children all
day’. At the other extreme, there stand the skilled professional journalists
with their chameleon-like ability to assume temporary membership of a
wide range of discourse communities. These observations suggest discourse communities will vary, both intrinsically and in terms of the
member’s perspective, in the degree to which they impose a world-view.
Belonging to the Hong Kong Study Circle is not likely to be as constitutive as abandoning the world for the seclusion of a closed religious
order.
Thirdly, to deny the instrumental employment of discourse conventions is to threaten one common type of apprenticeship and to cast a
hegemonical shadow over international education. Students taking a
range of different courses often operate successfully as ‘ethnographers’ of
these various academic milieux (Johns, 1988a) and do so with sufficient
detachment and instrumentality to avoid developing multiple personalities, even if, with more senior and specialized students, the epistemic
nature of the discourse may be more apparent, as the interesting case
study by Berkenkotter et al. (1988) shows. I would also like to avoid
taking a position whereby a foreign student is seen, via participation, to
assimilate inevitably the world-view of the host discourse community.
While this may happen, I would not want to accept that discourse
Remaining issues 31
conventions cannot be successfully deployed in an instrumental manner
(see James, 1980 for further discussion of variability in foreign student
roles). Overall, the extent to which discourse is constitutive of worldview would seem to be a matter of investigation rather than assumption.
Just as, for my applied purposes, I do not want to accept assimilation of
world-view as criteria!, so neither do I want to accept a threshold level of
personal involvement as criteria!. While it may be high in a small
business, a class or a department, and may be notoriously high among
members of amateur dramatic discourse communities, the fact remains
that the active members of the Hong Kong Study Circle – to use an
example already discussed – form a successful discourse community
despite a very low level of personal involvement. Nor is centrality to the
main affairs of life, family, work, money, education, and so on, criterial.
Memberships of hobby groups may be quite peripheral, while memberships of professional associations may be closely connected to the
business of a career (shockingly so as when a member is debarred), but
both may equally constitute discourse communities. Finally, discourse
communities will vary in the extent to which they are norm-developed, or
have their set and settled ways. Some, at a particular moment in time, will
be highly conservative (‘these are things that have been and remain’),
while others may be norm-developing and in a state of flux (Kuhn, 1970;
Huckin, 1987).
The delineation of these variable features throws interesting light on
the fine study of contexts for writing in two senior college Chemical
Engineering classes by Herrington ( 1985). Herrington concluded the Lab
course and Design Process course “represented distinct communities
where different issues were addressed, different lines of reasoning used,
different writer and audience roles assumed, and different social purposes served by writing’ (1985 :331 ). (If we also note thatthe two courses
were taught in the same department at the same institution by the same
staff to largely the same students, then the Herrington study suggests
additionally that there may be more of invention than we would like to
see in our models of disciplinary culture.) The disparities between the two
courses can be interpreted in the following way. Writing in the Lab
course was central to the ‘display familiarity’ macro-act of college
assignments (Horowitz, 1986a) – which the students were accustomed
to. Writing in the Design course was central to the persuasive reporting
macro-act of the looming professional world, which the students were
not accustomed to. The Lab course was norm-developed, while the
Design course was norm-developing. As Herrington observes, in Lab
both students and faculty were all too aware that the conceptual issue in
the assignments was not an issue for the audience – the professor knew
the answers. But it was an issue in Design. As a part consequence, the
level of personal involvement was much higher in the Design course
32 The concept of discourse community
where professor and student interacted together in a joint problemsolving environment.
The next issue to be addressed in this section is whether certain
groupings, including academic classes, constitute discourse communities.
Given the six criteria, it would seem clear that shareholders of General
Motors, members of the Book of the Month Club, voters for a particular
political party, clienteles of restaurants and bars (except perhaps in
soap-operas), employees of a university, and inhabitants of an apartment
block all fail to qualify. But what about academic classes? Except in
exceptional cases of well-knit groups of advanced students already
familiar with much of the material, an academic class is unlikely to be a
discourse community at the outset. However, the hoped-for outcome is
that it will form a discourse community (McKenna, 1987). Somewhere
down the line, broad agreement on goals will be established, a full range
of participatory mechanisms will be created, information exchange and
feedback will flourish by peer-review and instructor commentary, understanding the rationale of and facility with appropriate genres will
develop, control of the technical vocabulary in both oral and written
contexts will emerge, and a level of expertise that permits critical
thinking be made manifest. Thus it turns out that providing a relatively
constrained operational set of criteria for defining discourse communities
also provides a coign of vantage, if from the applied linguist’s corner,
for assessing educational processes and for reviewing what needs to be
done to assist non-native speakers and others to engage fully in them.
Finally, it is necessary to concede that the account I have provided of
discourse community, for all its attempts to offer a set of pragmatic and
operational criteria, remains in at least one sense somewhat removed
from reality. It is utopian and ‘oddly free of many of the tensions,
discontinuities and conflicts in the sorts of talk and writing that go on
everyday in the classrooms and departments of an actual university’
(Harris, 1989:14). Bizzell (1987) too has claimed that discourse communities can be healthy and yet contain contradictions; and Herrington
(1989) continues to describe composition researchers as a ‘community’
while unveiling the tensions and divisions within the group. The precise
status of conflictive discourse communities is doubtless a matter for
future study, but here it can at least be accepted that discourse communities can, over a period of time, lose as well as gain consensus, and at some
critical juncture, be so divided as to be on the point of splintering.
3 The concept of genre
Genre is a term which, as Preston says, one approaches with some
trepidation (Preston, 1986). The word is highly attractive – even to the
Parisian timbre of its normal pronunciation – but extremely slippery. As
a first step in the arduous process of pinning it down, I shall discount all
uses of the term to refer to non-verbal objects. These include the original
meaning of the term (in English) to refer to a type of small picture
representing a scene from everyday domestic life and its growing employment as a fancy way of referring to classes of real world entities. The
latter is illustrated in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by
‘large floppy rag dolls, a genre favored by two-year olds’.
The use of genre relevant to this study is glossed by Webster’s Third as
‘a distinctive type or category of literary composition’; however, the
dictionary’s citation – from The New Yorker – usefully expands the
context ofliterary to include ‘such unpromising genres as Indian Treaties,
colonial promotional tracts and theological works’. Indeed today, genre
is quite easily used to refer to a distinctive category of discourse of any
type, spoken or written, with or without literary aspirations. So when we
now hear or read of ‘the genre of the Presidential Press Conference’, ‘the
new genre of the music video’ or ‘the survival of game-show genres’, we
do so, I believe, without feeling that a term proper to rhetorical or literary
studies has been maladroitly usurped.
Even so, genre remains a fuzzy concept, a somewhat loose term of art.
Worse, especially in the US, genre has in recent years become associated
with a disreputably formulaic way of constructing (or aiding the construction of) particular texts – a kind of writing or speaking by numbers.
This association characterizes genre as mere mechanism, and hence
is inimical to the enlightened and enlightening concept that language is
ultimately a matter of choice. The issue then is whether genre as a
structuring device for language teaching is doomed to encourage the
unthinking application of formulas, or whether such an outcome is rather
an oversimplification brought about by pedagogical convenience. An
initial way of tackling the issue is to examine what scholars have actually
said about genres in a number of fields. For this purpose, the following
four sections briefly consider uses of the term in folklore, literary
33
THE CAMBRIDGE APPLIED LINGUISTICS SERIES
Series editors: Michael H. Long and Jack C. Richards
This series presents the findings of recent work in applied linguistics which are
of direct relevance to language teaching and learning and of particular interest to
applied linguists, researchers, language teachers, and teacher trainers.
In this series:
Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading edited by Patricia L. Carrel,
Joanne Devine and David E. Eskey
Second Language Classrooms – Research on teaching and learning
by Craig Chaudron
Language Learning and Deafness edited by Michael Strong
The Learner-Centred Curriculum by David Nunan
Language Transfer – Cross-linguistic influence in language learning
by Terence Odlin
Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition edited by Susan M. Gass
and Jaqueline Schachter
Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition by]. Michael O’Malley and
Anna Uhl Chamot
The Development of Second Language Proficiency edited by Birgit Harley, Patrick
Allen, Jim Cummins and Merrill Swain
Second Language Writing – Reseach insights for the classroom
edited by Barbara Kroll
Genre Analysis – English in academic and research settings by John M. Swales
Evaluating Second Language Education edited by]. Charles Alderson and
Alan Beretta
Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar edited by Terence Odlin
Academic Listening edited by John Flowerdew
Power and Inequality in Language Education by James W. Tollefson
Language Program Evaluation – Theory and practice by Brian K. Lynch
Sociolinguistcs and Language Teaching edited by Sandra Lee McKay and Nancy
H. Hornberger
Contrastive Rhetoric – Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing
by Ulla Conner
Teacher Cognition in Language Teaching – Beliefs, decision-making, and
classroom practice b)’ Devon Woods
Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition – A rationale for pedagogy
edited by James Coady and Thomas Huckin
Text, Role and Context – Developing academic literacies by Ann M. Johns
Immersion Education: International Perspectives edited by Robert Keith Johnson
and Merrill Swain
Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition edited by Catherine
Doughty and Jessica Williams
Exploring the Second Language Mental Lexicon by David Singleton
Researching and Applying Metaphor edited by Lynn Cameron and Graham Low
Interfaces between Second Language Acquisition and Language Tested edited by
Lyle F. Bachman and Andrew D. Cohen
Network-based Language Teaching edited by Mark Warschauer and Richard Kern
Genre Analysis
English in academic and
research settings
John M. Swales
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
DCAMBRIDGE V UNIVERSITY PRESS

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