Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
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instruction (Genre Analysis 2). Early work in ESP thus resembled research in corpus linguistics with its quantitative studies of the linguistic properties of language varieties, and to this day research in corpus linguistics continues to influence ESP genre research (Belcher 168; Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 119-20). As Swales notes, however, ESP studies since the 1960s have “concomitantly become narrower and deeper” than those early quantitative studies (3). They are narrower in the sense that the focus has shifted from broader register categories such as “scientific” or “medical” language to a narrower focus on actual genre varieties used within, say, scientific and medical disciplines (Swales, Genre Analysis 3). At the same time, ESP analyses have also become deeper in the sense that they not only describe linguistic features of language varieties but also their communicative purposes and effects. This “deeper or multi-layered textual account,” Swales explains, signaled an interest in “assessing rhetorical purposes, in unpacking information structures and in accounting for syntactic and lexical choices” (3). It is in their focus on describing and determining linguistic effects that ESP genre approaches help bridge linguistic and rhetorical studies of genre.
ESP and SFL: Similarities and Distinctions
ESP’s expanded interest from descriptive analyses of linguistic features to analyses of genres and their communicative functions not only helps distinguish ESP research from corpus linguistics (for more on this distinction, see Tardy and Swales, “Form, Text Organization, Genre, Coherence, and Cohesion”),8 but also reveals similarities and distinctions between ESP genre analyses and systemic functional linguistic genre analyses. There are several ways in which SFL and ESP genre approaches compare to and differ from one another. They both share the fundamental view that linguistic features are connected to social context and function. And they are both driven by the pedagogical imperative to make visible to disadvantaged students the connections between language and social function that genres embody. Such a “visible pedagogy,” according to Ken Hyland, “seeks to offer writers an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured and why they are written the way they are,” thereby making “clear what is to be learned rather than relying on hit-or-miss inductive methods” (Genre and Second Language Writing 11). Both ESP and SFL genre approaches are also committed to the idea that this kind of explicit teaching of relevant genres provides access to disadvantaged learners. As Hyland elaborates, “the teaching of key genres is, therefore, a means of helping learners gain access to ways of communicating that accrued cultural capital in particular professional, academic, and occupational communities. By making the genres of power visible and attainable through explicit instruction, genre pedagogies seek to demystify the kinds of writing that will enhance learners’ career opportunities and provide access to a greater range of life choices” (“Genre-based Pedagogies” 24).
While SFL and ESP genre approaches share analytical strategies and pedagogical commitments, they differ in subtle but important ways. Most obviously, they differ in their applied target audience, with SFL genre approaches generally targeting economically and culturally disadvantaged school-age children in Australia, as we saw in the previous chapter, and ESP genre approaches generally targeting more advanced, often graduate-level, international students in British and U.S. universities, who, as non-native speakers of English, are linguistically disadvantaged. This difference in target audience has important implications for how SFL and ESP approaches perceive and analyze target genres. Because both approaches teach explicitly “genres often assumed to be tacitly acquired via the normal progression of academic acculturation” but denied disadvantaged students (Belcher 169), the question of which genres to teach becomes crucial. Primary and secondary school students are not often, if ever, asked to write in what would be considered disciplinary or professional genres. As a result, SFL scholars and teachers have tended to focus their attention on what Ann Johns, following Swales, calls “pre-genres” such as explanations, recounts, or description (Johns, “Genre and ESL/EFL”).9 For ESP scholars and teachers working with advanced students whose academic disciplines and professional/occupational settings are more bounded and where the genres used within those contexts are more identifiable, the analytical and pedagogical focus has been on actual, community-identified genres used within those disciplinary settings—genres such as research articles, literature reviews, conference abstracts, research presentations, grant proposals, job application letters, academic lectures, various medical texts, legislative documents, and so on.
The differences in target audience and genre focus between SFL and ESP approaches highlight a related difference in understandings of context. Because SFL approaches generally focus on pre-genres, they have tended to define context at a fairly macro level. As we discussed in the previous chapter, SFL genre approaches locate genre at the level of “context of culture.” ESP genre approaches, however, locate genres within more specifically defined contexts (what Swales first termed “discourse communities”), where the genres’ communicative purposes are more specified and attributable. As we will discuss next, defining genre in relation to discourse community has had important implications for ESP genre approaches, allowing ESP scholars to focus on context and communicative/rhetorical purpose. At the same time, defining genre in relation to discourse community has to some degree also shifted the pedagogical purpose of ESP approaches away from the more overtly political, empowerment-motivated goals of SFL genre-based teaching to a more pragmatic, acculturation-motivated pedagogy aimed at helping advanced non-native English speaking students acquire “knowledge of relevant genres so they can act effectively in their target contexts” (Hyland, “Genre-based Pedagogies” 22).
Discourse Community, Communicative Purpose, and Genre
Three key and inter-related concepts—discourse community, communicative purpose, and genre—frame Swales’ approach to genre study. Swales defines discourse communities as “sociorhetorical networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals” (Genre Analysis 9). These common goals become the basis for shared communicative purposes, with genres enabling discourse community members to achieve these communicative purposes (9).
In Genre Analysis, Swales proposes six defining characteristics of discourse communities. First, “a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals” which can either be explicitly stated or tacitly understood (24-25). Second, in order to achieve and further its goals, a discourse community must have “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members” such as meeting rooms or telecommunications technologies or newsletters, etc. (25). Third, membership within a discourse community depends on individuals using these mechanisms to participate in the life of the discourse community (26). Fourth, “a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims” (26). These genres must be recognizable to and defined by members of a discourse community (26). Five, “in addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis” which can take the form of “increasingly shared and specialized terminology” such as abbreviations and acronyms (26). Finally, “a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” who can pass on knowledge of shared goals and communicative purposes to new members (27). As such, genres not only help members of a discourse community to achieve and further their goals; genres also help new members acquire and become initiated into a discourse community’s shared goals, hence the value of genre as a teaching tool within ESP.
By proposing that a genre “comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (58; emphasis added), Swales defines genres first and foremost as linguistic and rhetorical actions, involving the use of language to communicate something to someone at some time in some context for some purpose. While a communicative event can be random or idiosyncratic, motivated by a unique, distinct purpose, a genre represents a class of communicative events that has formed in response to some shared set of communicative purposes. A genre, therefore, is a relatively stable class of linguistic and rhetorical “events” which members of a discourse community have typified in order to respond to and achieve shared communicative goals.
Swales is careful to note that “exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality” (49), meaning that a text’s genre membership is not defined by “either/or” essential properties but rather along