The International Scene

     John Swales describes a discourse community to as one that must posses or be formed by six different pillars that create a general idea for a group of individuals to collectively identify themselves with it.

      More specifically, a discourse community is a community where there is a general consensus of what the community represents and what type of people belong to it according to its dynamic.

       As we analyzed the concept of the discourse community I realized that an interesting discourse community I believe to be a part of is that of the international students at Northeastern, or Boston, in general.

       Being an international student involves leaving your home country, native culture and language all behind to emerge yourself in something polar to what you are used to. Once my career at Northeastern began, just during the first two days I had met individuals, members of my international student community and friends from around 30 different countries, all of which where represented by the individual his or herself.

      Swale's first concept of a discourse community is the fact that everyone in the community must have a general idea of what the community is, and in this case, it was explicitly the comfort zone for all international students who felt like home was now in a completely different country. This allowed for most or all international students create a web of interaction and connection through social medias and orientation activities, which leads to Swale's second pillar for a discourse community. "A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members". Members of a community  cannot share the same idea or common knowledge if they are not constantly interacting. As we mentioned in class, face to face interaction is becoming less and less important compared to technological mechanisms that are rapidly becoming the principal method of communication among members of the community. When school is not in session for vacations, international students interact through Facebook when traveling is not always a possibility.

    Additionally, Swales explains how a discourse community utilizes and posseses one or more genre among the common knowledge within its members. This means that there are several rotating matters that concern the population of the community. In the case of the international student community, a genre ranges from the different languages spoken by the different members of the community and how they sub-divide among them, same with countries of origin, or, collective visa matters in which the International Student and Scholar Institute at Northeastern plays a vital role since it is the organization on campus that holds all important matters for the community, therefore presenting itself as a genre as well, and an important location and hub for the discourse community.

       When members of a community abundantly interact with each other, the type of language used in common conversations begins to evolve into becoming more casual according to the standards of the relationship and a more casual lexis is created due to the types of conversations taking place. In the case of the International students, the lexis created involves places where international students interact with each other like restaurants, cafes, discotheques such as Venu and Rumor, bars or houses of distinct members of the community where gatherings occur. Also, returning to the idea of the regional sub-division of international students, lexis can be created when members of the community come from regions where the vocabulary used is the same, therefore common designations are used in daily conversation for ideas or concrete things among other members.

   Lastly, the discourse community's membership is constantly evolving as "individuals enter as apprentices and leave" when graduation time arrives and one is not a student anymore. However, the communication and networking is constantly stimulated by technology advances.