It is a well-known fact that each person can speak and participate in any kind of discourse community due to the existed ability to create various discourse texts.
As far as I am personally concerned, I belong to the accounting discourse community. Accounting is my major at school, and I spend a great deal of my time to penetrate deeply into the subject matter of this particular field of study. And, without any doubt, I have to live in the accounting community discourse as some of my friends and people around me are also involved in accounting on different levels. Moreover, our modern life is based on a variety of economic principles, people are absorbed into counting either money or taxes. What is more, people observe and discuss the prices in supermarkets, and make numerous attempts to become an integral part of the chosen discourse community.
Another kind of community I belong to is the youth discourse community. My belonging to this community may be explained by the simple fact that I am a young person with my ambitions, interests, and skills. I think that none will argue that the youth has its specific vocabulary, genres, and problems that may affect the text that produces the discourse. More than that I am a member of the society and this makes me belong to the various discourse communities, no matter who participates in this discourse and what languages they use (social security discourse, street communication discourse, school discourse, etc).
It is necessary to admit that all discourse texts can be of different genres. However, for instance, in the case of the accounting discourse community to which I belong, three different genres of the discourse texts may be defined: the genre of producers, the genre of the customers, and the genre of brand awareness.
The first one concerns itself with texts and vocabulary that the producers mainly use (commercials ads, accounts, business reports, etc.); the second genre deals with customers’ viewpoint to the service provided and to the actions of the producers and their teams; and finally, the third genre may be characterized as the one combining both sides and dealing with the famous trademarks (the so-called “brands”), the customer’s awareness of them, and the producer’s desire to create a new brand or to drive the sales of an already existing one.
The discourse texts that are produced during that tag-like game are sometimes very difficult to be created by an uninitiated person, as well as to be used or read. Nevertheless, the unity of a good effort, persistence, necessity, or need and the fact of being surrounded by (or even existing in) this particular discourse makes me learn the idea of discourses deeper and understand how and why I need to be able to write, read, and use the texts of the accounting discourse community. From my own experience, I would like to stress that it is rather complicated and sometimes even boring for a non-native speaker of English to study the accounting discourse community texts.
The vocabulary and grammar seem to be the first problem because the use of some specific terms and word-combinations with the specific grammar constructions complicates the understanding of each of them. Another problem I faced with is the difficulty to retrieve correct information from this permanent “flood” of accounting problems, especially in the course of my studies. First, I could not simply understand what was needed so that I could start searching for the details.
I had to start studying this very problem of discourse genres and their lexis on the Internet forums. When people say that it was the Kilkenny cats’ fight, they mean saying nothing at all. It has been the persistent surfing on websites to get and expand basic information slowly to put every piece of information to its place. Finally, everything settled down in my head.