This reading, as stated, was dry and formal and uses linguistic terms not understood by a reader like

myself. But the concept he is putting forth hopefully has been grasped and accepted by myself. Although this is what I have obtained; There are six defining characteristics that make a discourse community and those are !" A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. #" A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. $" A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily o provide information and feedback. %" A discourse community utili&es and hence possess on or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. '" In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has ac(uired some specific lexis. )" A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Also in this reading, it opens my eyes to something related to this sub*ect but a more broad conceptive level. +any people early on and still to this day haven,t agreed or set in stone what exactly the definition of a discourse community is. There is no one definition. This idea also pertains to our language as a whole. I know -nglish, being my first language, is this way. There are multiple definitions, forms, articles and more that pertain to a single word. .ome words can have ten or more definitions *ust to itself all being used in a different way. /ohn .wales who spent his life as a linguist helps us single out what exactly a discourse community is and separate it from such things as speech communities. I personally believe that maybe being more up to date on his works as an author and teacher would allow me to better understand the piece but I hope that I have provided an ade(uate response to the reading set forth.