The Army ROTC is an elite leadership program designed to train and commission Officers to be future leaders in the Army. It motivates college students to be strong military leaders and better citizens. This group of individuals all across the country can be considered a discourse community because it follows the criteria outlined in Swales’ six characteristics of a discourse community described in his excerpt.
John Swales
John Swales is an American linguist and co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English at the University of Michigan. Swales defines his six characteristics for a discourse community as: has common pubic goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, has acquired some specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (222).
the Future of the Army ROTC Discourse Community
Since we know that the Army ROTC develops effective leaders, we are then able to explore other areas of the Army ROTC for research. For example, we could go into the different criteria of Swales and explore how literature affects the different lexis, or how it affects the different platoons or branches of the military and their modes of communication or interaction. There is such a broad field of study when it comes to discourse communities and their literatures that the research is essentially never ending, and can always be developed and discovered.