3 Academic communities

Until fairly recently research into academic discourse mainly con-

cerned itself with describing general contexts of academic life and
broad features of the register, exploring academic discourse rather than
discourses. Scientific writing was taken to be the prototype of such
discourse and its ability to represent meanings with little reference to
people seen as a model of more general principles of academic commu-
nication. Influenced by a growing acceptance of social construction
and more detailed descriptions of textual practices, however, a more
sophisticated appreciation of language variation has emerged over the
last decade or so. With doubt cast on the idea that knowledge claims are
decided by appeal to self-evident truths or faultless logic, the decision-
making of disciplinary groups has been elevated to greater importance.
This, then, turns our attention to the concept of community and what it
might contribute to our understanding of academic discourse.

3.1 The idea of ‘discourse community’

As I discussed in Chapter 1, successful academic discourse depends on
the individual’s projection of a shared professional context. Academic
discourses are not, in other words, just regularities of a peculiar kind
of formal style or the result of some mental processes of representing
meaning. Instead they evoke a social milieu, where the writer activates
specific recognizable and routine responses to recurring tasks. Texts
are constructed in terms of how their authors understand reality. These
understandings are, in turn, influenced by their membership of social
groups which have objectified in language certain ways of experiencing
and talking about phenomena. Academic discourse is therefore a reser-
voir of meanings that give identity to a culture. Assumptions about
what can be known, how it can be known, and how certainly it can be
known all help shape discourse practices, but while the notion of
community has informed a great deal of work into academic discourse,
it is by no means a settled and accepted concept, as I discuss in this
section.

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 Academic Communities

i. Basis of the concept

As early as the mid-1960s Del Hymes (1966) cautioned against relying
on abstract rules of communication and encouraged us to focus instead
on understanding the cultural assumptions and practices of social
groups. More recently, this sensitivity to a community-oriented view of
literacy has emerged through ideas such as communicative competence
in applied linguistics, situated learning in education and social con-
structivism in the social sciences. In particular it follows Faigley’s
(1986: 535) claim that writing ‘can be understood only from the per-
spective of a society rather than a single individual’ and Geertz’s (1973)
view that knowledge and writing depend on the actions of members of
local communities.
The concept of community draws attention to the idea that we do not
use language to communicate with the world at large, but with other
members of our social groups, each with its own norms, categoriza-
tions, sets of conventions and ways of doing things (Bartholomae, 1986).
The value of the term lies in the fact that it offers a way of bringing
writers, readers and texts together into a common rhetorical space, fore-
grounding the conceptual frames that individuals use to organize their
experience and get things done using language. It is therefore the basis
of communication for without such schema we would not be able to
effectively interpret each others’ discourses.
Theoretically, the concept is informed by Bakhtin’s (1981) influen-
tial notion of dialogism which stresses that all communication, whether
written or spoken, reveals the influence of, refers to, or takes up, what
has been said or written before while at the same time anticipates the
potential or actual responses of others. He points out that all utterances
exist ‘against a backdrop of other concrete utterances on the same
theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view
and value judgements (Bakhtin, 1981: 281). As we noted in the last
chapter, in engaging with others we enter into a community of shared
belief or value concerning what is interesting or worth discussing and
through our language choices we align ourselves with, challenge, or
extend what has been said before. The notion of community therefore
seeks to offer a framework within which these actions occur and so
characterize how speakers position themselves with and understand
others. It is a means of accounting for how communication succeeds.
So, in pursuing their personal and professional goals, academics
attempt to embed their talk and writing in a particular social world
which they reflect and conjure up through discourses which others
expect and anticipate. The ways we communicate with each other,

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Academic Discourse

exchange information, and work together will vary according to the

groups we belong to, and such rhetorical practices also reflect wider,
non-linguistic aspects of community. Specific linguistic realizations
like the avoidance of personal pronouns and the embedding of research
in previous literature, for example, index common ideologies such as
‘objectivity’ and the view that knowledge emerges in a linear step-wise
fashion in scientific practice. Community conventions are therefore
also a means of fostering group mythologies, solidarity and social con-
trol, helping to ring-fence communities by identifying their users as
insiders and excluding others.
This approach therefore asks us to accept a certain homogeneity in
the practices of social groups. Each discipline might therefore be seen
as an academic tribe (Belcher and Trowler, 2001) with its particular
norms and practices which comprise separate cultures. Within each
culture students and academics gradually acquire specialized discourse
competencies that allow them to participate as group members. Wells
sets these out as:
Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human
experience that has evolved over generations and each is depend-
ent on its own particular practices: its instrumental procedures, its
criteria for judging relevance and validity, and its conventions of
acceptable forms of argument. In a word each has developed its
own modes of discourse. To work in a discipline, therefore, it is
necessary to be able to engage in these practices and, in particular,
to participate in the discourses of that community.
(1992: 290)

Essentially, the idea of community draws together a number of key

aspects of context that are crucial to how spoken and written discourse
is produced and understood. Cutting (2002: 3) describes these as:
z the situational context: what people ‘know about what they
can see around them’;
z the background knowledge context : what people know about
the world, what they know about aspects of life and what they
know about each other;
z the co-textual context : what people ‘know about what they
have been saying’.
Community thus provides a principled way of understanding how
meaning is produced in interaction and so is useful in identifying how
we communicate in a way that others can see as ‘doing biology’ or
‘doing sociology’. In the academic world, these community conven-
tions both restrict how something can be said and authorize the writer
as someone competent to say it.

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