Running head: COMMUNITY CARE 1

Community Care

Karina Sosa

University of Texas at El Paso

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Introduction

A simple definition of a discourse community is individuals coming together to form a

group that has common goals and that work together to achieve those goals. John Swales felt it

was necessary to elaborate on what a discourse community is and did so by creating a set of

guidelines. To prove that Swales test works I studied an online community named

Community Care. Community Care assist social workers by providing them with a selection of

products that supports their continuously expanding career. Their resources range from online

direct messaging to publicly held convention to provide social workers with the best insight to

assisting their clients. I will be going over Swales six characteristics using Community Care as

an example.

Literature Review

John Swales' article The Concept of Discourse Community presents the six components

that he believes should be with in a discourse community. The first component he lays out is

common goals, a community should agree on a set of goals to accomplish as one rather than

individually. Following that component, the members of a community must be able to interact

and communicate with each other using ordinary resources. In using these resources, a

community conveys information and receives feedback to improve and further themselves

towards the goal. To develop their objective a community uses genres, One of the purposes of

this criterion is to question discourse community status for new or newly-emergent groupings.

Such groupings need, as it were, to settle down and work out their communicative proceedings

and practices before they can be recognized as discourse communities. (Swales, 1990, p. 222),

they spread their ideas with the public to get closer to their goal. A community speaks through a

specific language, they develop abbreviations and acronyms that only members within the
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community understand. Lastly, a discourse community should have levels of expertise in which

individuals can have different roles of leadership. Swales mentions that if a community is

missing either of these components they are not considered a discourse community.

Intertextuality and the Discourse Community written by James Porter stresses the

importance of intertextuality in a discourse community which is that all writing and speech

originates from one system. There are two types of intertextuality; iterability and presupposition.

Iterability is the repetition of quotes or references. Presuppositions are assumptions made from

reading a text, the words aren't clearly there. In other words, intertextuality explains that we as

writers get our ideas from other ideas or resources and that plagiarism is unavoidable. Porter

(1986) defines discourse communities as, a group of individuals bound by a common interest

who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated (p. 38-39). In

his opinion a discourse community should have common interests, forums and may not

necessarily have a clear leadership.

Swales and Porters opinions differ on discourse communities but somewhere along the

lines they have a couple similarities. They both agree that a discourse community should be a

group of people joining due to related interests or goals. Communication with in the group

should have approved artifacts or channels which could extended from emails, phone calls, text,

apps, etc. Their definition of discourse community begins with the same idea but eventually

splits because of contrasting beliefs.

Methods

Community Care is an online community, I visited their website and read all their

information looking for key points. The website allows you to sign up and create an account in
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which they deliver news and analysis directly to your inbox to help you keep up to date with the

latest developments in social care. It also provides a product called Community Care Inform, an

online resource for social care professionals working with children and/or adults to make

confident and legal decisions. It is a key tool to help you achieve consistent high quality social

work practice. Community Care also offers the best social care jobs and candidates. Those who

are seeking a job can search and apply online for the latest social care jobs. They also work in

partnership with social care employers helping recruit the right social care candidates. They also

host the largest convention in the United Kingdom called Community Care Live, it is a free

event for the social work field. It provides essential learning and professional development

through a mixture of training sessions, panel discussions, case studies and interactive learning.

People who attend can also meet and network with a range of local service providers in the field.

Discussion

The goal of Community Care is to present social workers with the finest and latest

information in their field. All their products are based around the idea of helping social workers

learn and practice proper skills to enhance their professional careers. A couple of their

mechanisms are the Community Care account, inform and jobs all found on their website. The

purpose of these mechanisms is to be able to communicate properly with group members, they

can interact easily and understand each other allowing them to achieve their goal. The genre that

Community Care has is the annual convention which they organize specifically to gather

thousands of people in the field of social work to teach and learn from one another.

Community Care doesnt fit the last two components of Swales six characteristics test,

language and expertise, but according to Porter it continues to be a discourse community. The

community holds a wide range of members and participants. These fellow acquaintances work
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together to help execute their set goals. They have common grounds of communication that

allow them to continuously stay in contact and further their aim. All levels of social care workers

join to express their different findings in hopes of assisting other members.

Conclusion

Even though Community Care doesnt completely fit the criteria that Swales provides, it

does fit Porters. Communication is vital in all discourse communities especially in Community

Care because they are an online organization; they wouldnt survive and prosper without it. Its

members comprehend what it takes to make this organization effective and successful. These

methods of communication are essentially what makes Community Care a discourse community.
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References

Swales, John J. S. (1990). The Concept of Discourse Community, 21-32.

Porter E. James, J. E. P. (1986). Intertextuality and The Discourse Community, 5 (1), 34-47.

About Us. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2017, from http://www.communitycare.co.uk/about-us/