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Communaute Discursive

This is a complicated term indeed. At first glance, French and American scholars are discussing the same thing: the discourse community, a notion introduced to composition theory in the 1980s in the United States and to didacticiens de l’écrit recently in France. But a closer look shows deep differences. Two other terms complicate the situation further, introducing other related aspects: constructivism and knowledge construction. I will try to clarify these concepts here, but the essential distinction in their uses is rooted in the social bent of United States composition theory and the research focus on post-secondary questions in the US as opposed to the comprehensive view taken by French scholarship, compounded by the language distinction between discourse and discours/discursive (the literal translation of communauté discursive is discursive community, not discourse community).

Definition(s)

For French “didacticiens” the discourse community references:

• social frames in which modes of thinking, saying, acting are ratified by a social group in which they make sense (Chanfrault-Duchet 2003).
• the social groups in which disciplinary knowledge finds its source (Dufays 2003).
• a community in which “…thinking, expressing oneself, constructing knowledge, arguing, explaining in writing all presuppose the possibility for the student to project him or herself into a space in which values can be shared and recognized, even if this sharing is done as polemic…” (Jaubert, Rebière and Bernié, 2004, pp. 56–57).
• a notion that permits us to introduce the social and discursive aspects of knowledge construction and to highlight that language is a way to semiotize disciplinary activity. This replaces the traditional version of knowledge as material facts that come to us fully formed, in order to recognize disciplines as ways of acting-thinking-speaking and not as “contents.” These modes of action come from the agreements made by a group. Each discipline has its discourse community and its language practices; the study of disciplinary languages, habits, and behaviors should thus be the natural domain of the members of these disciplines (Bernié, 2004).

Uses in la didactique

Particularly linked to schooling as a community endeavor, a co-constructing of the classroom community, and thus a co-construction of school knowledge (in my interpretation of what I have read about the discourse community idea in France), the concept offers a way to understand how a class builds community and how students appropriate and construct for themselves the knowledge in various subjects in their courses. That appropriation is understood as a cognitive construction in the vygotskian sense (see “constructivism”). Of course, based on this definition, we must accept the language choices and the modes of acting-thinking-speaking in question as put into place by the various participants in the world of school (teachers, Official Instructions, school-discipline knowledge, students…) while still of course related to the scholarly knowledge of reference. For Jaubert, Rebière, and Bernié (2003), the discourse community is a space “Defined by the subject’s representation of the social space, the interlocutors possessing recognized means of expression (genres), cognitive values, deontic values, practical and/or intellectual procedures, recognized as relevant…” (p. 55). Notice in this perspective the student’s role as the representation he or she creates of the school space, and the implicit support for the reproduction of existing school values and procedures (such as the value of an integration or an acculturation into the school community).

The construction made possible by the interaction in the discourse community of the classroom is founded, among other things, on the possibility for a student to evolve in a proximal zone of development (as proposed by Vygotsky). We are here still in the frame of individual and cognitive development, although in interaction with the social. Unlike the social-constructivists (see below) in the United States, French scholars linking themselves to this line of thinking do not appear to be trying to identify and thus to solidify the features of a community and its role in the evolution of a student’s writing. In this perspective, according to Bernié, the student must institute (?) him or herself as “school Subject” (or construct enunciative positions for each school subject [Jaubert and Rebière 2004]), and the epistemological status of language is actually a condition of knowledge construction.

C. Fisher and C. Simard emphasized in 2004 that the discipline “French” exists as a community with its own ways of thinking-speaking-acting and that “the mastery of language develops through a diversified use of language in specific disciplinary contexts,” which means that we must treat French as not a universal but varied depending on context. They emphasized at the same time that inside the L1 French discourse community, subcommunities matter as well: grammarians, linguists, literary theorists, and the very specific discourse community of “French class,” influenced by various lines of thought. This definition does not distinguish, however, the difference highlighted by Savatovsky (1999) between French as school subject and as a scholarly discipline.

We could imagine that the description of a discipline offered by M. Foucault in 1971, cited in le Français à l’Ecole (Hatier 1999) would lend itself to the concept of discourse community, but this definition does not appear to include school subjects:

The “discursive community” concept is currently evolving in France, and is frequently referenced in discussions and articles, but its future is not clear, as not all research groups accept its value. Bourdieu’s “habitus” and Bakhtin’s “spheres of activity” are among the concepts being proposed as alternatives.

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