A discourse community I belong to is the place I work in the summer, called Canoe Island Lodge, a resort on Lake George, New York. I am the bartender at the resort. Other employees there hold jobs such as servers, boat boys, groundskeeping, housekeeping, cooks, a childrens director, a maintenance worker, a manager, and the owners. The owners live in a house right next to the resort, and almost everyone else who works there is from out of town, including myself, so we live rogether in lodges across the street. Accoring to Swales in "The Concept of Discourse Community," there are six criteria that discourse communities contain. The six criteria are: common goals, intercommunication, info/feedback, genres, lexis, and members. Canoe Island Lodge's common goals are a little different for each employee but a shared one throughout the resort would be that all of the guests are treated politely, and are having fun. Intercommunication between employees takes a few forms. employees text the manager with questions/concerns when needed, we can email them during the off season with questions/informtation, the groundskeepers and housekeepers have walky-talky type things in order to be able to be contacted quickly, and there is usually someone in the office, so you can call or stop into the office whenever you need to communicate with a manager/owner. Info and feedback generally comes from the manager, Joe, if you need to be talked to about what your doing well/bad, or what you need to work on, he is the man that does the talking to. Occasionally, one of the maagers will say something too you, but there is generally for severe cirsumstances. There are many genres used at the workplace. The boat boys have a "water wait" list for people who want to go water skiing to sign up on. As bartener, I have a ticket for each room number for writing bar tabs on. The office workers have endless amounts of genres used, between tip chart sheets, to insurance papers, to bill papers, etc. Canoe Island Lodge has some Lexis used by workers at the resort. One might consider the table numbers in the dining room a lexis, or certain names of places around the lodge such as the names of the boats, decks, cottages, etc. The members of the Lodge are all the employees who work there. There are about 35 employees, one manager, and two owners. The owners names are a couple named Tom and Carla Burhoe. Carla's father built and started the resort. When he died, her husband bought out the resort from her brothers and sisters, and therefore became the joint owner along with his wife.
I am interested in using this as my example of a discourse community because I am involved in it, and I feel there is a lot of different areas/jobs within this discourse community in which I could expand on. It is also a very tight-nit community. Everyone is knows everyone very well, unlike some other larger, or corporate societies in which you really only interact with a select few of the members.
I am thinking of interviewing either one of the owners, the manager, or my close friend, Kirsten, who is a boat girl.
Texts I can analyze would be either emails, forms, or menus.
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Hi Katie-
ReplyDeleteGood description of the d.c. using Swales. It's interesting that you identify the social group as "tight-knit." I remember you were also talking about all these specific communities or jobs that are somewhat separate but also belong to the larger community of the resort. I would have liked to hear more about that and seen some development of your ideas. You do have some good ideas for an interview, though. Would you be able to do this by phone or email? You also have a few ideas for texts to analyze.
The next step would be to define some specific research questions/topics. The idea I have is that you examine these specific communities interdependent relationships in the larger resort community. This would be a way to both use the work Johns does on "levels of community" but also add to it/complicate it.
I wonder if you could determine how the little groups in the community influence each other in terms of writing and language?
This is one idea. You could take it in other directions too, but you'll want to find a focus (or 2) before doing your interviews so you have an idea about what kind of data you want to collect.