A useful concept underlying the present study is what has been referred to as discourse
communities. A discourse community essentially draws attention to the idea that
language is not particularly used to communicate in the world at large. Rather, language operates among groups of people – or perhaps between members in a group – recognised as specific social networks of language users who share defined goals, norms and values. By virtue of their membership and participation in the group over a period of time, members are expected to gain sufficient awareness of the norms and practices of the group they belong to, evident in the ways they exchange information, dispute ideas, present themselves in the discourse, make claims and argument, etc. (Hyland, 2012). Gee (2004) discusses the idea of discourse communities using the term affinity spaces whereas in the context of scholarly communication, Hyland (2009, 2012) prefers to use
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the term disciplinary (or academic) cultures. According to Hyland (2009: 47), the value of a discourse community is considerable as “it offers a way of bringing writers, readers and texts together into a common rhetorical space, foregrounding the conceptual frames that individuals use to organise their experience and get things done using language”.
Swales (1990: 24-27) has outlined the defining characteristics of a discourse community in six points; namely, 1) a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals; 2) it has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members; 3) it uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback; 4) it utilises and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims; 5) in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis; and 6) it has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Despite the obvious relevance of the idea of a discourse community to the use of language, the notion has come under some criticism.
One such criticism has been the view that a discourse community rests on the assumptions of the sociolinguistic notion of speech community, which had been variously discussed by sociolinguistic scholars such as Gumperz (1968) Labov (1972) and Hymes (1972) before the emergence of the notion of discourse community. Thus this view argues that the notion of a discourse community does not really offer a conceptual shift from the long-held idea of a speech community, and therefore the two concepts could not be clearly separated.
However, I agree with the suggestion by Swales (1990) and Blanton (1998) that a discourse community has a different reality from a speech community. Quite clearly, the kinds of conscious strategies used to identify, select and include the members of a
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discourse community are different from those of a speech community. Swales (1990) has stated that even if the definition of a speech community includes shared linguistic forms, shared regulatory rules and shared cultural concepts, an alternative definition for a discourse community is necessary. He identifies three important ways the two notions can be distinguished. The first concerns medium: the term speech seems to exclude communities that are predominantly engaged in writing (e.g., academic communities), and whose members are likely to communicate with other members in other parts of the world and receive feedback. In such communities, reactions and feedbacks to members are more in the form of writing rather than speech.
The second point that separates the two notions, according to Swales, is that whereas a speech community is a sociolinguistic grouping, a discourse community is a
sociorhetorical one. Thus in the former, the discoursal characteristics and linguistic
behaviour of the group (e.g., socialisation, group solidarity etc.) are shaped by social factors. However, the discoursal characteristics and linguistic behaviour of a discourse community 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 …” (Swales, 1990: 24). It is the goals of members that determine the discoursal characteristics in a discourse community.
The final difference between the two notions noted by Swales relates to membership: a speech community tends to be more general as its membership may be open to everyone in the society by virtue of birth, accident or adoption; a discourse community, on the other hand, “recruits its members by persuasion, training or relevant qualification” (Swales, 1990: 24). Clearly, Swales succeeds in establishing that the
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underlying assumptions of the two notions are different and each is important in specific contexts of language use.
The notion of discourse community is important in academic communities and academic literacy studies. It has been especially useful in the development of scholarly writing skills and in helping novice scholars to be “inducted into their disciplinary discourse communities through various forms of apprenticeship” (Flowerdew, 2000: 128). Flowerdew (Ibid: 128) further notes that academic discourse communities stress “the participatory, negotiable nature of learning and the fact that learning is not always based on overt teaching”.
Thus in this study, the idea of a discourse community serves as a useful framework from which to explore epistemic rhetorical practices in scholarly journal articles written in English, especially by non-native English-speaking academics. While the notion of
discourse community remains quite a contested concept, at least within academic
discourse communities, it represents a “principled way of understanding how meaning is produced in interaction and proves useful in identifying how writers’ rhetorical choices depend on purposes, setting and audience” (Hyland, 2009: 66).