Abundancia y dinámica poblacional de insectos según gremio alimenticio

The discussion of genre theory above has referred frequently to the notion of discourse community because “genres are the properties of discourse communities” (Swales 1988: 211). Bloor (1998) expresses the same idea when she calls discourse communities the parents of genres. ‘Discourse community’ has become a term widely used to refer to a community that is defined by its uses of language and that shares interpretive practices (Beaufort 1997; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1993; Bizzell 1982, 1992; Hyland 2004a; McCarthy 1987; Swales 1988, 1990). The notion of discourse community has implications for identity because it sees a community member as being part of a rhetorically constituted group of writers and readers (Hyland 2002f). As Hyland notes:

writers typically position themselves and their ideas in relation to other ideas and texts in their communities and this helps them both to legitimate their membership and establish their individual identities through discourse…. The notion of discourse community has therefore become a powerful metaphor in joining writers, texts and readers in a particular discursive space (Hyland 2002f: 41).

This conceptualisation of the link between genre and discourse community is crucial within the social framework to an understanding of the relationship between text and the speaker/writer and in accounting for rhetorical purpose and writer identity (Bloor 1998). Considered in this way, students in a hospital who are required to write reports on a particular case are, by so doing, acquiring the communication practices of a medical discourse community.

The notion of discourse community, or rhetorical community, is a social construct (Bruffee 1986; Miller 1994; Swales 1993) and its members do not necessarily share a particular place or time, although Swales (1998) cautions against a reductionist view of a discourse community existing only through texts. What characterises the concept of the discourse community is that its members are seen to share purposeful goals (Borg 2003; Swales

1990). The community metaphor has also given rise to the idea of the ‘disciplinary community’ and of the ‘community of practice’. Becher (1981, 1987), drawing on work by the anthropologist Geertz (1983), has shown how various disciplines differ in terms of culture, epistemology and discourse, forming, as it were, different “academic tribes” with their own “territories” (Becher and Trowler 2001).

One early description of a disciplinary community is found in the work of Kuhn, who defines a scientific community as “men [sic] who share a paradigm” (Kuhn 1970: 176), in other words, the producers and validators of scientific knowledge. According to Kuhn, membership of a scientific community or disciplinary matrix can be identified by means of criteria such as membership of professional societies, shared techniques, conference attendance and patterns of citation. The members of the community have amongst their goals the training of new members. Thus the scientific community is responsible for what Toulmin (1972: 159) calls “enculturation” of novices into the discipline. Toulmin indicates that this process is applicable to any disciplinary activities, not just to science.

Enculturation or apprenticeship is also seen as the way learning takes place in a ‘community of practice’ (Brown et al 1989; Lave and Wenger 1991; Scollon 1998). Here the emphasis is on collaboration and social interaction, with learning taking place through situated activity and peripheral participation in the community and participation bringing about transformation as well as reproduction of social practice. Drawing on this work, Prior (1994, 1998) argues for a ‘sociohistoric’ approach to the disciplines, describing them as evolving entities. New members are made aware of the histories of the discursive practices of the community and that they are not fixed. Through negotiation with the experts in the discipline and their authoritative discourses, newcomers are able to bring their own experiences and insights, their “internally persuasive discourse” (Prior 1995b: 320), into their writing in the academy. Through a Bakhtinian dialogue, experts and students may shift from their original positions to new positions that are satisfactory to both. As Ivanič (1998: 82) points out:

the value of studies of disciplinary discourse communities is not that they produce a taxonomy of their characteristics; but that they uncover in increasing degrees of subtlety and sophistication the social processes at work in such communities.

The construct of community and its associated genres has proved to be a powerful one, assisting us in understanding issues around academic and professional writing, as in the

work of Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999), Freedman and Medway (1994), Gunnarsson et al (1997), Hyland (2004a), Johns (1997), MacDonald (1994), Porter (1986) and others. Beaufort (1997) draws on data from the workplace to show the validity of the notion of discourse community. Hyland (2002d: 121) summarises its importance for a large body of recent writing research as follows:

by focusing on the distinctive rhetorical practices of different communities, we can more clearly see how language is used and how the social, cultural, and epistemological characteristics of different disciplines and professions are made real.

Ivanič (1998: 83) finds the notion of the discourse community particularly useful in considering writer identity, defining a person’s identity as “constructed by their membership of, their identification with, the values and practices of one or more communities.”

Nevertheless, the concept of community has also been criticised as being vague and utopian (Faigley 1986; Paré 1993). Harris questions the usefulness of a concept that he sees as “ghostly and pervasive” (Harris 1989: 15). How can this concept, he asks, accommodate the need to ‘initiate’ our students into “real groupings of writers and readers”, groups which are sites of both consensus and conflict? Others (e.g. Canagarajah 2002; Chin 1994b; Nystrand 1990; Prior 1998) view the concept as deterministic and static, “a way of labelling individuals as insiders or outsiders, as people who either have the requisite values, knowledge, and skills to belong, or lack these necessary qualifications” (Cooper 1989: 204).

In fact, it is clear that no simple homogeneity or consensus can be claimed for discourse communities (Bizzell 1992; Jolliffe and Brier 1988; Miller 1994; Rafoth 1990). One reason for this is that people are typically members of multiple discourse communities (Bex 1996). Some scholars (e.g. Casanave 1995; Killingsworth 1992) have examined actual discourse communities to explore the variety and conflict that exists in them. Clark (1992) and Starfield (2001) explore in the academic discourse community the conflict that results from power relations within the wider social context. Miller (1994) views the community as a site of both conformity and conflict, using Giddens’s (1984) concept of ‘duality of structure’ in structuration theory to explain this. For Giddens, social structure is a virtual entity existing in its instantiations, which in turn reproduce the structure, making it available as a resource for further use (see Giltrow and Valiquette 1994). This is why, Miller suggests, the community

tends to conformity and homogeneity while at the same time, because it is constituted through the actions of individuals, it is fundamentally heterogeneous. As Thralls and Blyler (1993: 8) explain, discourse communities have a normative force with regard to written communication, while at the same time they are “shaped by their discursive practices and the discourses they generate”. Swales (1993) has also emphasised instantiation and engagement as the cohesive forces within discourse communities.

It is thus clear that there is general acceptance of the fact that discourse or rhetorical communities are not homogeneous and closed but rather open to change (Bhatia 1999; Bruffee 1984; Hyland 2004a; Porter 1986; Prior 1994, 1998). One way in which change occurs within a discipline is exemplified by Sullivan (1996), who shows how, in a particular journal article, the writer contributes something new to the field by challenging a single aspect of accepted disciplinary orthodoxy (methodology) while at the same time establishing his legitimacy to contribute to discussion within the discipline by means of a display of other aspects of this orthodoxy (narrative knowledge, hierarchy and disciplinary knowledge). Opportunities to bring about change within the genres shared by a particular discourse community seem thus to require some demonstration of discourse expertise.

As novice writers in their field, the radiography students, whose texts target the recognised medical genre of the case report, are nevertheless members of a discourse community that comprises radiographers, radiologists, and academics, “individuals with diverse experiences, expertise, commitments and influence” (Hyland 2004a: 9). Not all members of the community have the same ability to bring about change within genres and the social contexts in which they are located. Rafoth (1990) shows how the notion of discourse community goes beyond a descriptive function to an explanatory significance when it is used to show how language operates to define issues of identity and power. The concept is thus useful in making visible for us the social context of the student writer as she (most of the students in the radiography class are female) grapples with sometimes conflicting purposes and identities in the writing task at hand. One of these purposes will be the production of a piece of writing for assessment since, as Dias et al (1999: 44) suggest, student writing is always “characterised by an inherent and inevitable duality. On the one hand, such writing is ‘epistemic’…. At the same time, however…scripts are produced as ways of enabling … students to be graded.” The context of situation for the report assignments is discussed in Chapter 4. Linked with this is another interesting contextual consideration for the texts explored in my study. The students were asked by their lecturers to reflect personal involvement with the patients they discuss and this was done in order to resist a perceived lack of empathy for patients on the part of radiographers. How this is achieved will also be

explored in the analysis of their texts in Chapter 4 and the issue taken up again in a discussion of the pedagogical implications of this study in Chapter 5.

To return to the notion of expertise, this is specifically addressed in the cognitive tradition, which seeks to understand the composing processes of expert writers in order to make them accessible to novices. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1983) suggest the operation of different processing models at different developmental stages of writing. Thus, they distinguish between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming models. In this way they account for the differences evident between school literacy, characterised by reproduction of knowledge, and professional literacy, characterised by use of rhetoric and the positioning of the writer as an authority. In Scardamalia et al (1984) and Scardamalia and Bereiter (1985) this theory is extended. Writing is seen as a process of problem solving which involves a dialogue (an internal dialectical process) between a content problem space and a rhetorical problem space. Use of the knowledge telling strategy reveals that the writer is limited to the

content space and there is no dialectical process. Geisler (1994), following this ‘dual

problem space’ model, expands on how these problem spaces interact and claims that expertise is achieved when these spaces are represented both in abstract terms and also in interaction with each other. Experts, in other words, see texts not simply as means of saying things but also as doing things like persuading or arguing. Novice undergraduate writers, by contrast, are characterised by a naïve representation of the rhetorical problem space. Thus:

Textbooks, still the mainstay of the curriculum, are interpreted as containing the domain content upon which students will be tested. Writing, on the rare occasions it is used, serves to duplicate the knowledge structure of these texts…. Knowledge still has no rhetorical dimension (Geisler 1994: 87).

While this comparison of novice and expert writers seems to suggest a basis for understanding how the writing of radiography students differs from that of the professionals who publish case reports in the field, the cognitive approach is limited in that it does not take the social context into account and assumes that expertise can be defined generally across discourse communities (Beach and Hynds 1990; Bizzell 1992; Faigley 1986). While novice writers do not lack the ability to use generic writing strategies, it seems that local knowledge is important in becoming a competent writer (Carter 1990). As Hyland (2002f: 60-61) states: “The more learners become familiar with the genres and expectations of their target communities, the greater the accumulated store of experiences they can draw on to meet those expectations.”