Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
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The teaching-learning cycle has been adapted by various researchers (for example, see Macken et al; Hammond et al; Rothery; Feez and Joyce), but its basic components include three stages: modeling, joint negotiation of text, and independent construction of text. In the first stage, students are exposed to a number of texts representing a given genre. During this stage, students and teacher identify the cultural and situational context in which texts in the genre function, what social purposes they serve, how their structural elements reflect their functions, and how their language features carry out their functions. As such, the first stage moves from discussion of context and social purpose to a description/analysis of register and language. In the second stage, students and teacher engage in the joint negotiation and then construction of a text within the genre, first conducting research, developing content knowledge, note-taking, observing, diagramming, and then working to collaboratively produce a version of the genre. In the final stage, students independently construct a version of the genre by conducting research to develop content knowledge, drafting the text, conferencing with teacher and peers, editing, evaluating, and publishing their text (Cope and Kalantzis 10-11). The cyclical shape of the model is meant to reflect its flexibility, so that teachers can enter into the model at the stage most appropriate to students’ level of preparedness (Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 30-31). At the same time, it is meant to reflect how students and teacher can keep rotating through the cycle as more and more complex genres are added. The teaching-learning cycle, thus, makes visible to students the structural and linguistic features of genres, and how these features are connected to social function.
The teaching-learning cycle and the SFL view of genre upon which it is based have not been immune from critique, on either the pedagogical or theoretical fronts. On the pedagogical front, scholars such as Gunther Kress, Bill Cope, and Mary Kalantzis have raised concerns about the degree of formalism exhibited by such an approach, in which generic models and structural analysis are used to teach students how to write texts “correctly” (Cope and Kalantzis 12). Kress also raises concern about the classifying impulse behind Martin et al’s approach to genre, in which genres are classified and then modeled to students as though they were givens. By starting with model texts and examining the social purposes embodied within them, such an approach ignores the material/social relations and contexts that may not be visible in the text’s structure and features, but that play an important role in how and why the text functions the way it does (Cope and Kalantzis 14). Pedagogically, critics worry that such an approach to genre teaching promotes a “linear transmission pedagogy” in which “textual form is largely presented in an uncritical way at the modeling stage” for students to emulate (Cope and Kalantzis 15). As Cope and Kalantzis explain, “The cycle imagery . . . belies the fact that the underlying pedagogical process is linear. Not only is this a reincarnation of the transmission pedagogy but it also takes genres at their word and posits their powerfulness uncritically, solely on the grounds that they should be taught to groups of students historically marginalized by the school literacy” (15). This approach, they fear, can easily lead to a “cultural assimilationist model of education” (16).
In an updated version of the Teaching Learning Cycle that attempts to address some of these concerns, Feez and Joyce add a separate category called “Building the Context” which precedes text modeling. The context building stage of the cycle employs ethnographic strategies for “learners to experience and explore the cultural and situational aspects of the social context of the target text” (Feez 66). Such strategies include research, interviews, field trips, role-playing, and cross-cultural comparisons.
On the theoretical front, critics have raised concerns about SFL’s view of genre and its trajectory, moving as it does from social purpose/text structure to register analysis to linguistic analysis. While Martin is careful to note that genre realizes ideology, which he defines as the “system of coding orientations engendering subjectivity—at a higher level of abstraction than genre” (“Analysing” 40), and while Christie and Martin have acknowledged the role of genre “in the social construction of experience” (Genres and Institutions 32), the SFL model, critics note, does not examine the ways in which genres not only realize but also help reproduce ideology and social purpose. That is, by taking “genres at their word,” such a view of genre also takes social purposes at their word, thereby ignoring why certain social purposes exist in the first place as well as what institutional interests are most served through these purposes and their enactments. According to Terry Threadgold, genre theory is significant because of the relations it reveals between genres and institutions, power, the construction of subjectivity, as well as “the relations it permits/enables/constrains and refuses between readers and writers, textual producers, and receivers” (102). Threadgold’s critique hinges on SFL genre theory’s use of genres as a starting point for textual analysis while overlooking the “web of social, political, and historical realities” in which genres are enmeshed (106). As Threadgold elaborates:
What we need to know is how institutions and institutionalized power relationships and knowledges are both constructed by and impose constraints on (and restrict access to) possible situation types and genres. We need to know why certain genres are highly valued, and others marginalized. We need to understand the changing history of such valorizations. We need to know why some genres are possible, others impossible, ways of meaning at given points in history. We need to know how and why these factors construct identities for social agents . . . and how and why some social agents are able to/willing to resist and others to comply with existing situational and generic constraints. (106)
At the same time, Threadgold, following Derrida, also argues that because texts are always performances of genres, genres are less stable than SFL approaches imagine: “Genres and system cannot therefore have static, fixed values, and the extent to which they are predictive of choices in lexico-grammar is constantly subject to slippage and change . . .” (116). Indeed, as Brian Paltridge has demonstrated in his analysis of Environmental Studies research articles, genre identification depends more on contextual cues and interactional and conceptual frames than on structural and linguistic patterns (Genre, Frames and Writing 84-85).
While such findings raise questions about SFL approaches to genre pedagogy, the research and debates within SFL genre approaches have been crucial in establishing how genres systemically link social motives/purposes to social and linguistic actions. By arguing for genre as a centerpiece of literacy teaching, SFL genre scholars have debated the ways genres can be used to help students gain access to and select more effectively from the systems of choices available to language users for the realization of meaning in specific contexts. In the next section, we will discuss how scholarship in historical and corpus linguistics has also informed work in genre study.
Genre and Historical/Corpus Linguistics
Although work in genre within historical and corpus linguistics has not yet had a great impact on rhetorical genre theory and Rhetoric and Composition studies (with the notable exception of Amy Devitt’s work), it has much to contribute to research and teaching of genre by accounting for the nature of typology and for language change. In this section, we will examine debates over genre categorization within historical and corpus linguistics, and how such debates might help clarify confusion between genres and modes within Rhetoric and Composition studies. Then we will examine how corpus based studies of genres provide insight into how and why genres change.
According to Hans-Jürgen Diller, the field of historical linguistics became interested in text classification when it expanded its scope of study from sentences to texts (11). Within text linguistics, Diller describes two trajectories of classification: Deductive and Inductive text typologies, which parallel in some ways the difference between what Todorov describes as analytical (or theoretical) versus historical (or empirical) approaches to genre classification, described in Chapter 2. Deductive text typologies, which Diller represents through the work of Robert Longacre (The Grammar of Discourse), seek to create over-arching categories for genre and text classification in a way similar to how Northrop Frye sought to identify universal archetypes in order to classify and describe relations between literary texts. Longacre, for instance, “bases his typology of ‘Notional’ or ‘Deep Structure’ text types . . . on the ‘notional categories’ which in his view underlie human language” (Diller 12). The four “notional text types” (or modes) for Longacre are Narrative, Expository,