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Methods

The question I will explore through my research project is how discourse

communities, lexis, genres and case studies help a dental office function properly. I

developed this question after reading most of the articles I have found and realized they

give broad definitions as to what each of my subtopics mean and what they’re all about

but not how they can be used in a real life situation, in this case a dental office. For

example, John Swales defines a discourse community as a group of people that shares

goals or purposes and uses communication to achieve them while Anthoney Liddicoat,

asserts that each discourse community has it’s own valued texts and norms of

communication which are determined both by the communicative needs of the discourse

community and by the patterns of communication found in the particular culture of the

writers. Although they are both correct they don’t give insight as to why a discourse

community has valued texts or norms.

In order to further explore how these headings contribute to the practical use of a

dental office, I will conduct a study to see how they all rely on each other and if one of

the headings were missing, there would be no discourse community. I will interview my

hygienist, Iradia Reardon of Ira Kotch dental and ask her questions such as how she

communicates with her patients, how she communicates with the doctors, different

phrases or shorthand she might use and if her office has ever looked over case studies and

used them on future patients. By conducting this study I will be able to piece together

how my heading work together to help a discourse community run effectively.