Discourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience.

Discourse communities are groups of people who share common ideologies, and common ways of speaking about things. They can be sharply or loosely defined. We are each members of multiple discourse communities. Discourse can colonize the members of discourse communities, taking over domains of thought by means of ideology. The development of new discourse communities can serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. In our own work on the narratives of people with interests in health care, for example, we find that patients speak of their illness experiences as victims of circumstance; policy makers construct adverse experiences and challenges as opportunities to be taken; health care workers speak from a mixed perspective, seeing themselves as both victims and opportunists depending on context. To be trapped within the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across discourses. Membership of a discourse community can impair the habit of critique, and deny opportunities for heteroglossic discourse. Privileging critique as a mode of discourse perhaps might define the ethical community, suggesting that ethical community may be an antidote to the constraining effects of conventional discourse community.

Response-A Critical Response to "Discourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience".

In their article Little, Jordens, and Sayers developed the notion of "discourse communities"-as groups of people who share an ideology and common "language"-with the support of seminal ideas from M.M. Bakhtin. Such communities provide benefits although they may also impose constraints. An ethical community would open to others' discourse and be committed to critique. Those commitments may counter the limitations of discourse communities. Since their paper was published in 2003, the notion of "discourse communities" has been widely adopted and applied in healthcare and beyond. Their ideas were influential in the founding of an ethics centre in Sydney and contributed to articulating the values which underpin this journal. This commentary notes that an ethical community is fragile in responding to current onslaughts on truth and meaning-potencies inherent in discourse communities. The essay takes Bakhtin's ideas further to explore intrinsic forces at play in dialogue, language, and art. This leads to discussing the centrality of ethics in Bakhtin's thought. For him, the essence of discourse is a dialogic exchange which comprises both art and ethics. It is art in that self and other are created in the exchange. It is ethical in that "I" am answerable to the other, as a phenomenological reality, in the moment of intersubjectivity.

A comparative analysis of English for academic purposes teachers' interactive metadiscourse across the British and Chinese contexts.

This exploratory research compares the interactive metadiscourse use by native English-speaking English for academic purposes (EAP) writing teachers in the United Kingdom and their non-native counterparts in the Chinese contexts. The analysis is based on a self-compiled corpus, including two sub-corpora, which were composed of instructor contributions to classroom discourse: eight sessions of EAP lessons from the Chinese context and eight sessions of EAP lessons from the British context. Adopting an interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the two sub-corpora were compared to examine the similarities and differences in their use of interactive metadiscourse. Findings of the comparative analysis reveal that EAP teachers from both contexts rely heavily on transition markers and frame markers to organize their teaching but differ in particular linguistic realizations. This may indicate the impact of a range of factors such as logical preferences, development order of acquisition, discourse community, and speech community on teachers' interactive metadiscourse strategies. The article concludes with a few implications for metadiscourse research in spoken academic genres.

Experiences in the workplace community and the influence of community experiences on ENP courses for nursing professionals.

BACKGROUND: A nursing community can be described as a discourse community or a Community of Practice (CoP). No matter what type, a nursing community exerts influences on its group members' worldviews, perspectives and beliefs. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this research is to explore what nurses' experiences of membership within the nursing community are and how such experiences influence nurses' views of English for nursing purposes (ENP) courses. DESIGN: A qualitative case study was conducted in a medical centre in Taiwan in which many foreign patients seek medical treatment and in which English is highly valued. PARTICIPANTS: Nine nurses who had at least three years working experience in relation to clinical practice participated in the study. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews and shadowing observations were the two primary methods of data collection. RESULTS: Five themes emerged: (1) building of the nurse-patient relationship, (2) provision of patient-centred care, (3) negative caring experiences, (4) professional identity, and (5) perspectives on ENP courses. CONCLUSIONS: Nurses' connection with the community led for them to a focus in their working lives. This determined their perceptions of ENP courses.

Lenguas extranjeras, escritura y desarrollo: un reto para el profesional de las ciencias médicas / Foreign languages, writing and development: a challenge for health professionals

El notable incremento de la colaboración médica cubana en la arena internacional y la revolución en las ciencias informáticas ha generado la necesidad de una reconceptualización de del aprendizaje de la escritura en el estudio de las lenguas extranjeras, el inglés en particular, en la educación médica superior. Se exploran los beneficios que aporta este tipo de competencia al estudiante de lenguas extranjeras y se particulariza cuán necesario es esta habilidad para el profesional de la salud.

The growing Cuban health sector collaboration with other countries as well as the revolution in information sciences has brought about the need to reconceptualize the role of learning how to write in foreign languages, English in particular, in Higher Medical Education. The present work explores the general contribution of this type of competence to the learner of foreign languages and gives particular attention to the usefulness of this skill to the health professional.