Communities in studies of discursive practices and discursive practices in communities

For more than two decades now, the field of Applied Linguistics has witnessed much research interest in discursive practices in a wide range of academic and professional settings as also reflected in some of the chapters in this volume. The wealth of studies conducted has mostly been motivated to serve practical ends such as those in ESP instruction and corporate communication training. Despite the diversity in their focuses and methodological approaches, many such studies share some of the same terminology when referring to their contexts of investigation, and among the most common is the notion of community, a term that has been linguistically modified in a variety of ways. We have, for example, discourse community, community of practice and scientific community, which have now become widely invoked in the literature. In this chapter, I will provide a brief overview of the epistemic origins of the three notions of community, how they have been characterised, how they have been taken up in early and current studies of professional communication, and what the plethora of language studies have revealed about discursive practices in specific communities. I will end the chapter by proposing some of the directions that future studies of discursive practices in specific communities may consider.