Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
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has been nominated as the privileged property of a genre” (52), a genre prototype is determined by how closely it corresponds to its communicative purpose. From there, as Swales explains, “[o]ther properties, such as form, structure and audience expectations operate to identify the extent to which an exemplar is prototypical of a particular genre” (52). As such, it is the rationale behind the genre that “shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style” (58). In short, the rationale determines a genre’s allowable range of substantive, structural, syntactic, and lexical choices, and the extent to which a text exists within this range will define its genre membership.
Because a genre’s rationale as well as it schematic, syntactic, and lexical conventions are all defined against the backdrop of a discourse community’s shared goals, how members of a discourse community define genres is important to how genre analysts understand their function and structure. For this reason, ESP genre analyses, more so than SFL analyses, rely on a discourse community’s “nomenclature for genres [as] an important source of insight” (Swales 54). Such naming, as Swales suggests, can provide valuable ethnographic information into how and why members of discourse communities use genres. However, as we will examine later in this chapter, although research such as Ann John’s important work combining genre analysis and ethnography (1997) and Swales’ “textographic” study of a university building (1998) employ ethnographic strategies, the extent to which ethnographic approaches have played (or should play) a role in ESP genre analyses and the purposes for which such approaches have been used remain subject to debate.
ESP Approaches to Genre Analysis
Because it is communicative purpose (defined in relation to a discourse community’s shared goals) that gives rise to and provides the rationale for a genre and shapes its internal structure, communicative purpose often serves as a starting point for ESP genre analyses. A typical ESP approach to genre analysis, for example, will begin by identifying a genre within a discourse community and defining the communicative purpose the genre is designed to achieve. From there, the analysis turns to an examination of the genre’s organization—its schematic structure—often characterized by the rhetorical “moves” it undertakes, and then to an examination of the textual and linguistic features (style, tone, voice, grammar, syntax) that realize the rhetorical moves. The trajectory of the analysis thus proceeds from a genre’s schematic structure to its lexico-grammatic features, all the while attending to the genre’s communicative purpose and the discourse community which defines it. The process is by no means linear or static, but generally speaking, it has tended to move from context to text (Flowerdew 91-92), with context providing knowledge of communicative purpose and discourse community members’ genre identifications.
In Analysing Genre: Language in Professional Settings, Vijay Bhatia outlines seven steps to analyzing genres, which reflect the trajectory described above. Not all ESP genre researchers will follow all these steps, and not always in the order Bhatia outlines, but together these steps provide insight into the range of ways ESP genre researchers go about conducting genre analyses in academic and professional contexts. The first step involves placing a given genre-text in its situational context. Step two involves surveying the existing research on the genre (22). With the genre identified and contextualized, step three involves refining the researcher’s understanding of the genre’s discourse community. This includes identifying the writers and readers who use the genre and determining their goals and relationships to one another, as well as the material conditions in which they function—in short, identifying the “reality” which the genre represents (23). Step four involves the researcher collecting a corpus of the genre. Step five introduces an ethnographic dimension, with Bhatia recommending that the researcher conduct an ethnography of the institutional context in which the genre takes place (24) in order to gain “naturalistic” insight into the conditions in which members of a discourse community use the genre. Step six moves from context to text, and involves the decision regarding which level of linguistic analysis to explore: lexico-grammatical features (for example, quantitative/statistical study of tenses, clauses, and other syntactic properties, including stylistic analysis) (25-26), text-patterning (for example, the patterns in which language is used in a particular genre, such as how and why noun phrases and nominalizations are used in different genres), and structural interpretation (for example, the structural “moves” a genre utilizes to achieve its goals, such as the three-move CARS [Creating a Research Space] structure of research article introductions as described by Swales). In the final step, Bhatia advises researchers to seek a specialist informant from the research site to verify findings (34).
While the extent to which step five (conducting an ethnography) is utilized in ESP genre approaches varies both in terms of its frequency and specificity, in general Bhatia’s methodology for genre analysis describes the trajectory that most ESP genre approaches have taken, moving from context to textual analysis and, at the textual level, applying various levels of linguistic analyses, from lexico-grammatical features to language patterns to larger structural patterns. Swales’ well-known and influential analysis of the research article in Genre Analysis generally exemplifies these levels of linguistic, textual, and structural analyses. For example, in analyzing research article (RA) introductions, Swales first identifies the typical “moves” authors make within the introduction (Swales and Feak have defined a “move” as a “bounded communicative act that is designed to achieve one main communicative objective” within the larger communicative objective of the genre) (35): from “establishing a territory” (move 1) to “establishing a niche” (move 2) to “occupying the niche” (move 3) (141). Within each of these moves, Swales identifies a range of possible “steps” RA authors can take, such as “claiming centrality” and “reviewing items of previous research” in move 1 and “counter-claiming” or “indicating a gap” in move 2. From there, Swales examines steps more specifically by analyzing text-patterning and lexico-grammatical features within different steps. In analyzing step 3 (reviewing items of previous research) within move 1 (establishing a territory), for instance, Swales looks at patterns of citation, noting patterns in which RA authors either name the researcher being cited in their citing sentence or reference the researcher in parenthesis at the end of the sentence or in end notes. Moving from text-patterning to lexico-grammatical features, Swales then identifies the frequency of “reporting verbs” (such as “show,” “establish,” “claim,” etc.) that RA authors use “to introduce previous researchers and their findings” (150).
This general approach to genre analysis within ESP—from identifying purpose to analyzing a genre’s rhetorical moves and how these moves are carried out textually and linguistically—and the research that has emerged from it has contributed greatly to our knowledge of discipline-specific genres, notably research articles as well as what Swales has called “occluded genres” that operate behind the scenes of research articles (genres such as abstracts, submission letters, review letters, etc.). Such knowledge has enabled graduate-level non-native speakers of English to gain access to and participate in academic and professional discourse communities (Swales, “Occluded Genres” 46).10
Recent Developments in ESP Genre Study
Over the past twenty years (see Diane Belcher’s “Trends”), ESP genre research has focused on issues related to communicative purpose, context, and the dynamic, intertextual nature of genres. Eleven years after the publication of Swales’ Genre Analysis, Inger Askehave and John Swales, reflecting on the notion of “communicative purpose” in light of more complex, dynamic understandings of context and cognition, wonder if “’communicative purpose’ has assumed a taken-for-granted status, a convenient but under-considered starting point for the analyst” (197). They point to research that “has, in various ways, established that . . . purposes, goals, or public outcomes are more evasive, multiple, layered, and complex than originally envisaged” (197), and note how genre researches such as Bhatia had already recognized that while genre conventions constrain “allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form, and functional value, . . . these constraints . . . are often exploited by the expert members of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of socially recognized purpose(s)” (Bhatia 13). Askehave and Swales acknowledge that “we are no longer looking at a simple enumerable list or ‘set’ of communicative purposes,