ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of the 'discourse community'. It explores the function of the behavioral checklist. The chapter considers the notion of 'communicative competence'. Swales points out that 'those interested in discourse communities have typically sited their discussions within academic contexts, thus possibly creating a false impression that such communities are only to be associated with intellectual paradigms or scholarly cliques'. The 'public goals' are the furtherance of medical science, improvements in patient care and the like. 'Mechanisms of intercommunication', 'participatory mechanisms' and 'genres' all include things like conference papers, journal articles, emails between scholars and so on, and the 'threshold level' of members is self-explanatory. There are two relevant dimensions in the checklist, namely 'interpersonal skills' and 'communicative skills'. Items in the scale 'interpersonal skills' show low generalisability coefficients. The scale 'communicative skills' displays low levels of inter-observer reliability with the exception of the item on the quality of summaries.
