Swale's Discourse Community

Putting Children First:

A Discourse Community Analysis of a Daycare

At Children’s First, our mission is to keep a safe, healthy, prosperous environment for children. Being a part of this community, I know firsthand what it takes to maintain an ideal setting for children to grow. It is essential for the caretakers to communicate, share information, and work together to put the children first. This core goal of ours, along with my own experience, analysis, interviewing, and observation demonstrate that Children’s First Daycare is a discourse community according to Swale’s six characteristics of a discourse community.

Swale’s Six Characteristics Summarized John Swales received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and became a professor of linguistics

This is essentially reinforcing the second characteristic as well as stating that a discourse community should provide information and feedback through its means of communication. Sticking with the basketball team example, information and feedback would be given to the players, to critique them. They may have meetings with their whole team or separately with the coach. They’re given constructive criticism by their players and coaches for the betterment of the team.

The fourth characteristic states, “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.” (221). Swales defines genre as different types of communication, not just verbal, but also written. Genres of a discourse community could be group messages, online posts, emails, notes, and more. Each discourse community is going to have different, specific genres they

This means that a discourse community has an abundance of members ranging from entry level or new to members with years of experience and expertise. For example, in the restaurant business, you will have new employees, older employees, and the chain of expertise just keeps rising up to the bosses, owners, and CEO’s. Swales reiterates this idea when he says, “Survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts.” (Swales