Running head: DISCOURSE COMMUNITY ETHNOGRAPHY 1

Abstract
Swales (1990) describes discourse communities as special groups with a shared goal that
use different mechanisms of communication, genres, and terminologies to communicate with
each other. Swales (1990) also states that discourse communities use their mechanisms of
communication only for topics related to their shared goal. These groups of people are composed
of a balanced number of experts and novices so that they can continue existing once the old
members retire. Since my major is civil engineering, I decided to study a hydraulic engineering
class to understand how this class works as a discourse community, and to prove that the
discourse community decides what is accepted and what is not accepted when it comes to
writing. Another goal I had was to understand the writing environment I am going to be exposed
to in my career. I attended the class and I interviewed an expert (the teachers assistant), and two
novices, (students), to get two different points of view about the class. I also collected some
writing samples for my study. After analyzing my data I discovered that the class is a discourse
community because it shows all the six characteristics described by Swales (1990) and these
characteristics are shaped and controlled by the discourse community. Additionally, I found the
study very helpful because now I have an idea of what type of writing skills I will be expected to
show for my upper level classes.





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Discourse Community Ethnography
According to Swales (1990), a discourse community is a group of people with same
interests and goals who interact with each other to achieve those goals. These people also have
different methods of communication which are exclusively to talk about their common goal. A
discourse community also has specific terminology that outsiders cannot really understand and
that is taught to the new members by the experienced members. It is important that members of
this discourse community understand this concept because their ideas have to be expressed in a
certain format in order to be accepted by the discourse community. The purpose of my study is to
fully understand how an upper level class for my career works as a discourse community. Since
my major is civil engineering, I am interested in hydraulics which is the study of water as a
resource and how we manipulate it to use it in our favor, so I decided to study a hydraulic
engineering class to understand how this class works as a discourse community and prove that
the nature of this discourse community shapes the style and the structure of the writings in the
community. Another goal I had was to understand the writing environment I am going to be
exposed to in my career.
Literature Review
My study is based on the article The Concept of Discourse Community written by John
Swales. In this article Swales (1990) describes a discourse community as a group of people that
meets six requirements or characteristics:
1. The members of the discourse community have a common set of goals.
2. A discourse community has methods of communication among its members
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3. A discourse community uses its methods of communication to provide information or get
feedback about the common goals.
4. A discourse community uses genres to communicate. Genres being the format in which
the information is given.
5. A discourse community has specific lexis. This means that in a discourse community, the
members use specific terminology to communicate with each other.
6. A discourse community has a balance between experts and novices.
Method
To develop my study I chose a class about hydraulic engineering because my major is
Civil Engineering and the topic of the class was very interesting to me. After making sure the
class fitted my schedule, I emailed the professor in charge of the class so that he gave me
permission to study his class. Professor Walton agreed and I prepared myself with some
questions about the students and teachers goals, the communication methods, the genre, and the
terminology used in the class. After that, I attended to one of the labs for three hours, and
interviewed two students and the teachers assistant because I could not find Professor Walton. I
considered that the teachers assistant was not the most professional person to interview, but at
least he had much more knowledge that a student. At the end of the interviews I collected some
writing samples from the students. This writing samples were handouts, notes and a lab report.
Basing on this I could get different points of view about the class itself because I got opinions
from novices and from a person with more time involved in this discourse community. When I
was done collecting my data, I started analyzing it in more detail. This led me to my conclusions
discussed in the continuing section.

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Results
The first characteristic of a discourse community is a set of common goals. From one of
the students point of view, her goal is as simple as getting a good grade in the class so that she
gets a Bachelors Degree, while for her fellow student, the class means an opportunity to learn
more about what she enjoys doing. The first student is a new comer, she is still learning the
concept of engineering. The second student has a Bachelors degree already, she has also worked
on the field and she is now trying to get a Masters Degree. Their goals may differ a little, but I
think this is because they have different levels of experience. The teachers assistant stated that
his goal was, to provide students with an understanding of hydrology processes as well as
hydraulics. Furthermore, show them how engineers have control over designs and the steps that
they can take to implement more sustainable practices as it pretends to water use and water
resources. (O. Broesicke, personal communication, March 6, 2014). The goals of these
members seem to be more defined as their experience increases. The experience is distributed
and the people with most experience teach the new comers. When I attended the lab, the
teachers assistant explained to the students what they were going to do and what they were
expected to observe. While the students were doing the experiment, the second student,(the most
experienced one), was trying to explain the first student why the water was moving in a certain
way when they applied pressure. When the students were done with the experiment they had
some questions that the teachers assistant answered and explained so that the students could
write the lab report. All of them were very nice and they explained to me everything they did
because I was the person with the least experience and I did not know what they were doing.
According to Swales (1990), there should be a balance between experts and novices, but the
class I studied consisted of fifteen students, two teachers assistants, and the professor meaning
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that it was a very small class, and the students were some more experienced than others. I
considered that there was a fair balance between the members showing the sixth characteristic of
a discourse community.
Another aspect of a discourse community according to Swales (1990) I noticed about this
class is that it has multiple mechanisms of communication. The most important is the class itself,
lecture. Professor Walton teaches his lecture every Tuesday and Thursday in a class room.
Besides lecture, the students attend to a lab once a week where they experiment with different
tools required for the field and they get to see all the properties of water while interacting with it.
They work in groups of five people and discuss their findings as a class. The teachers assistant
mentioned that Professor Walton created a website where the students can find everything that he
uses in class including PowerPoint presentations, handouts, videos, etcetera. He also stated that
students can always email either the professor or the teachers assistant through the UTEP
system, they can also call to their office, or make an appointment with them. The students said
that they use facebook, text messages, phone calls, and study groups to communicate with each
other at any other time besides class. They all agreed that the purpose of these communication
methods was to express concerns about hydraulic engineering. Showing another characteristic of
a discourse community expressed by Swales (1990): A discourse community uses its
participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. (Swales, 1990 p.
472).
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Figure 1: Example of lexis used
in this discourse community.
Because the topic of this group of people is hydraulic engineering, math and physics is
what they use to understand each other. They use math to develop conclusions and theories, and
then they use experiments and math to prove those theories. The formula they used in the lab was
WHP= (Qxh)/3960 where WHP is Water Horsepower, Q is discharge or flow rate, and h is
height of water. They can manipulate this equation to solve for the variable they need and then
they can calculate things and predict what is going to happen if they increase or decrease the
flow rate for instance. According to the students and the teachers assistant, they use numbers,
Greek symbols, and letters that most of the time represent constants or variables, to
communicate. During the interview, the teachers assistant explained to me that there are
symbols that not only represent a number or a constant, but they represent actual processes that
need to be taken into account for a calculation. A common
symbol they use is g it stands for gravity which is fairly
predictable because most people that have taken physics
before know that g stands for gravity, but there are some
symbols that only hydraulic engineers understand like
some drawings shown in figure 1. This is a terminology
used only in this specific branch of engineering. These
symbols are valid for hydraulic engineers all around the
world, and they are important because it is part of the
language they use to communicate with each other. This
shows the characteristic of lexis in a discourse community
described by Swales (1990).
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The last aspect of a discourse community described by Swales (1990) is genre. This
means that there is a specific format to follow when writing. The information given by the
professor during lecture comes in form of PowerPoint slides in a bullet format. As engineers the
students do not have to turn in essays or long papers using any kind of citing (APA, MLA).
Students from this class are expected to take notes during class, and write lab reports. The notes
can be written in any way the students want as long as they understand and they can study later.
The first student mentioned before, the new comer, assures that Professor Walton constantly
provide them with helpful handouts containing formulas and the highlights of the chapters. She
also said that she writes little notes on the sides or on the back of the handouts. The second
student prefers to take notes in her notebook and to keep the handouts just in case she needs them
later. The notes they showed me contained graphs, math formulas, and short sentences in
English. The lab reports have a certain structure and according to the teachers assistant they
have to be professionally written in a passive voice and in third person. Lab reports have to
follow the following structure.
Introduction
Method
Data
Results
Discussion
If the lab report is not in this order it is considered disorganized and receives a very low grade.
According to the teachers assistance it is very important to him that his students write properly,
this means proper grammar, sentence structure, and chronologically. It is important that the
students follow the format of a lab chronologically because if it is not in this order, the lab report
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does not make sense. Students cannot discuss any results if they havent showed that those
results are based in accurate data and the person reading the lab report will want to know where
that data came from. He stated that he expected his students to write the most professional they
can in any language, by this he means that for this class English has to be used properly and if
the students have grammatical errors he takes points off. He stated that he is aware of
international students of course, but he said that even if international students do not know all the
grammar rules, there is always someone they can ask for help before turning in a lab report.
Discussion
My findings led me to the conclusion that the discourse community decides what is
correctly expressed and what is not, for example if the students turn in the lab report in a
different order than the one explained before, the teachers assistant thinks it is not good enough
and he takes point off. If hydraulic engineers didnt have all those symbols it would be very
confusing and hard to understand a power plant plan or how a system works. If they do not use
those formulas, they do not have way to prove their theories to other hydraulic engineers and
therefore their ideas are not even considered because they are based on nonsense. The discourse
community rules the writing patterns used among its members and this important for us to
understand this because every discourse community is different and as members of different
discourse communities we have to be able to adapt to each different discourse community in
order for our ideas to be accepted and approved. My study was successful to its purposes because
I am now certain that I will have to have a certain level of professionalism when writing for this
class. I have the time to prepare for this and I will polish my grammar hopefully before turning
in my first lab report for this class. I got motivated to continue in my career because I had the
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opportunity to stay and help one of the groups while doing the water pump lab, which was
amazing.

















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References

Swales, J. (1990). The concept of discourse community. Writing about Writing , 466-479.
















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Appendix A
(Writing Samples)




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