1. Swales says that speech communities are centripetal because they absorb people into a community. Meaning that they are members of that specific community from birth/upbringing. He says that discourse communities are centrifugal because they split people into occupational or special interest groups. Meaning that people can be apart of different groups based on interest or job (earning a spot in the group) and not be forced into a group of people that speak the same language.
2.  The six defining characteristics of a discourse community is the group has a common public goal(s), members communicate with each other and share information, has one or more genre specific to the group in communication, the group has their own terminology (language) that people outside the group might not understand, and a threshold level of members with varying knowledge.
3. One of the problems with the discourse community concept is that it doesn’t take into account any conflict between group members. (static definition, not how groups change over time, not a real-world description of what people do)

Questions after video

1. I think the gap is that the intended readers of this piece are not clear on the definition of a discourse community and they aren’t considering the problems of the concepts of discourse community
2. This piece gives a clear definition of what defines a discourse community and describes some of the problems
3. The intended audience of this essay is for academics (linguist, Eng. studies)
4. The danger of an essay like this is that it provides another way to label another person based on their discourse communities.