Bon Jrang 1 Sperots Bon Jrang Megan Keaton ENG111-09 8 July 2013 Discourse Community A discourse community is a group

of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals". At the airport, there is a working community called Fresh Attraction. In there they have one store manager, one assistance manager, three supervisors, and thirty two workers. There are some full-time and part-time employees. The managers and supervisors do not require to wear stores uniform, but they have to dress professionally, dark color pant semi-shirt. The employees are strictly required to wear black hat, red shirt that the company provided and their own black belt, black kaki pant, black shoes. After hours of busy serving customer, in order to release some stress, the managers usually come around and tap on employees shoulder and said Good Job! But when the managers or supervisors call an employee to talk one-on-one in the office, then its either he/she got warning or write up. If a group of managers and supervisor come with an angry face toward an employee, he/he will be fire for two weeks or forever. In order to become an employee, first they must apply online, and then the manager will review their application. If the application meets the basic requirement, the human resource will call and set up an interview with the applicant. At the interview, the manager will ask applicant few questions to gather his/her relevant information. If the applicant qualified, the manager will

Bon Jrang 2 take him/her to the store, introduce him/her to everybody, and give him/her two red shirts and two black hats. And most likely he/she will begin working the day after. For the first two weeks, he/she will follow his/her trainer's schedule. Then the assistance manager will make a schedule and daily line up for him/her. When the manager and assistant manager not at the store, the supervisor and assistant supervisor help them to organize the store and keep everybody at work do what they supposed to do. The goal of the community is to serve the food to the hungry traveler customer. The employees are the person to be there and help to achieve that goal. Every year, the company will raise the salary about twenty-five cent. And every month, the managers and supervisors will meet up and pick one among the workers to be the employee of the month. He/she will receive a twenty-five dollars gift card and a small tablet with the company logo and his/her name on it. The purpose of it is not for co-worker to be jealous of each other, but to look up at each other and a way to motivate each other to work harder. At work sometime there will problems among co-worker or worker and customer, and there will always be supervisor to solve it. If the supervisor cannot solve the problem, they usually write a note and stick it to message board at the door. Because some of the worker dont have cell-phone, or simply dont know how to use cell-phone, or they dont have the managers phone number, therefore writing on a piece of paper I the easiest way to contact with the manager. On the piece of paper, they must clearly write who wrote it, and to whom, the date, and the reason for writing it. What happened and what was the result, if the employee has any complain about the problem, it will be dealt person-to-person. Sentence must be clear and to the point. If the authors of that note do not know how to write English, they also can write it in Spanish or French. The manager is able to read and speak multiple languages.

Bon Jrang 3 Hang-Out Friends community is different than the work community. There are six people is this group, Sam, Bi, Nai, Sinu, Hoang, and Andrew. They are very close to each other, like brothers from another mother. Sam tends to wear big hip-hop jean, and t-shirt. Andrew tends to wear Jordan shoes, short kaki, and polo shirt. Bi, Nai, Sinu, and Hoang always wear skinny jean, caps that has same color to their cars, and white t-shirt. When they hang-out together, they mostly make fun of anything they see, not offensive way but just for some good laughter from each other. On the weekend, if everyone has free time, they usually go to the mall to watch movie, or just go sit at the Starbucks and share about their day at school or at job. Besides having fun and hang-out with each other, they also have a ritual that every Wednesday night, they would get together, donate some money and come visit a friends family who are sick or having problem with financial. Sometime at church has new comers from Vietnam; they would invite them to go eat lunch as a way to say Welcome to America. They also involve in helping kids with school-homework or bible on Sunday after church. Because of technology is growing each day, they mostly communicate to each other by text message. They use the texting method because they believe sometimes inconvenient to make a phone call, and texting eliminates the window for awkward conversation. Also, texting can be done at all times, whereas it might be rude or impossible to make a call at other times. It is easy, fast, reliable, and everybody is doing it. Their text is short and to the point. It doesnt have to be long but enough information to inform the receiver what sender need. Texting gives them the flexibility to think before they say which is a comfort and feels not forced. After hangout with each other so long, they automatic know that if after fifteen minutes and no message is replied

Bon Jrang 4 back, the other are busy. They also developed some short cut for texting, example "couz" mean "cousin", "ez" for easy", "w8" for "wait". In the end, discourse community is a community that has a particular pattern of speech and actions limited to its members only. They are any groups that share ways of communicating in terms of established routines, and writing formats. Being a part of different discourse community, make it easier to relate to the different activities they involved in and allow them to grow in different ways. Without these discourse communities none of them would be the person they are today. People need to realize that they are a part of something bigger and not just left out. The discourse communities are the one that have shaped who they are in professional, civil, academic, and personal life.