Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
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make possible and what they obscure, and so on. This more critical approach to genre, its proponents argue, shifts the focus from a pedagogy of cultural accommodation to what Pennycook calls a “pedagogy of cultural alternatives” (264), whereby students can potentially adapt genre conventions in order to represent alternative purposes and/or their own cultural perspectives.
Related to the critique of ESP’s pedagogy of accommodation has been a concern with ESP’s potentially prescriptive view of genre. Christine Casanave has warned, for example, that ESP genre-based approaches can privilege “a socially situated product perspective” (82), while Kay and Dudley-Evans observe that ESP approaches tend to focus on the teaching of “conventionalized lists of genre-identifying features” which can lead to “an imposed rather than a responsive notion of text” (311). The result can be characterized as a competence-based rather than performance-based acquisition of genres, in which students recognize and reproduce a genre’s constitutive conventions but are not as able to apply and adapt these genre conventions in response to actual communicative goals and situations.
In “Understanding Learners and Learning in ESP Genre-based Writing Instruction,” An Cheng takes up the distinction between “noticing” and “performing” genre (86). Cheng critiques ESP genre approaches for focusing too exclusively on examining target genres, and calls for more learner-and-context-focused research that “examines learners’ learning of genre and their development of generic/rhetorical consciousness” (77). The slighting of learners and learning in ESP genre approaches (a charge that could also be leveled against rhetorical genre approaches) raises important questions about what it means to use genres. To what extent does genre competence (knowledge of genre conventions) translate into genre performance? Is knowledge of genre conventions enough, or does genre performance require inter- and extra-textual knowledge that exceeds the ability of text-based genre analyses to deliver? If genre knowledge involves more than just knowledge of genre conventions, then what does genre knowledge entail? And how do genre researchers and teachers access and identify that knowledge? Questions such as these push at the disciplinary edges of ESP genre approaches, bringing us to the boundaries and debates between ESP and Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) approaches.
The way that RGS scholars have taken up the above questions reveals important differences between ESP and rhetorical genre approaches, having to do with the sociological nature of genres and the extent to which genres can and should be taught explicitly. While both ESP and rhetorical genre scholars acknowledge the dynamic relationship between texts and contexts, and while both recognize genres as situated rhetorical and linguistic actions, RGS has tended to understand genres not only as situated within contexts such as discourse communities, but also as constitutive of contexts—as symbolic worlds readers and writers co-construct and inhabit. That is, for RGS, context provides more than valuable background knowledge regarding communicative purpose(s), discourse community members, genre nomenclature, or even genre chains and occluded genres—significant as these are. Generally speaking, then, while ESP genre scholars have tended to understand genres as communicative tools situated within social contexts, rhetorical genre scholars have tended to understand genres as sociological concepts embodying textual and social ways of knowing, being, and interacting in particular contexts.
Even when more recent ESP genre research has acknowledged the sociological nature of genres, such as when Ken Hyland, cited earlier, describes how genres “not only embed social realities but also construct them,” the emphasis of ESP genre analysis has remained on explicating genre conventions (schematic and lexico-grammatic) against the backdrop of the genre’s social context.13 So while both ESP and Rhetorical genre approaches recognize genres as relating texts and context, the point of emphasis and analytical/pedagogical trajectory of each approach has differed, so that, generally speaking, in ESP genre study, context has been used to understand texts and communicative purposes while in Rhetorical Genre Studies, texts have been used to study contexts and social actions—in particular, how texts mediate situated symbolic actions.
The difference in emphasis between communicative purpose and social action not only reflects different analytical trajectories between ESP and rhetorical genre approaches; it also underscores different pedagogical philosophies and goals. Rhetorical genre researchers, for example, tend to question whether explicit teaching of genre is enough, arguing instead for a more immersion- and ethnographic-based pedagogy in which students encounter, analyze, and practice writing genres in the contexts of their use. Such an approach, RGS researchers argue, allows students to get at some of the inter- and extra-textual knowledge that exceeds knowledge of genre conventions and that genre users must possess in order to perform genres effectively. Around the time of Swales’s Genre Analysis, Charles Bazerman was describing this rhetorical/sociological view when he suggested that writing instruction should go beyond “the formal trappings” of genres and instead help make students aware that “the more [they] understand the fundamental assumptions and aims of [their] community, the better able [they] will be . . . to evaluate whether the rhetorical habits [they] and [their] colleagues bring to the task are appropriate and effective” (Shaping 320, 323). As Mary Jo Reiff recently put it, “Making genre analysis the focal point of ethnographic inquiry . . . ties communicative actions to their contexts and can illustrate to students how patterns of linguistic and rhetorical behavior . . . are inextricably linked to patterns of social behavior” (Johns et al, 243).
The debate between explicit and more sociological approaches to genre teaching is not absolute, of course, and many genre scholars and teachers employ hybrid models that cross boundaries of the debate, as we will examine in the next two chapters and in Chapters 10 and 11. But as Diane Belcher explains, “for learners faced with linguistic and literacy barriers . . . ESP proponents contend that immersion is not enough” (171). Christine Tardy, while acknowledging genres’ complexity (as a “kind of nexus among the textual, social, and political dimensions of writing”), likewise advises that, given the non-native English speaking population most often targeted in ESP genre approaches, it is necessary to compartmentalize genres. As Tardy writes, “some of the advanced ESL writers I observed, for example, had difficulty analyzing genres from a linguistic and rhetorical perspective and then drawing links between these features and the rhetorical scene. They found little relevance in such analysis and at times saw the complexities of genre as too abstract to be of use. Perhaps at some stages and for some learners, more filtered or compartmentalized views of genre are also necessary” (Johns et al, 239).
This pedagogical debate and the set of theoretical questions that inform it bring us to the permeable yet dividing boundaries between not only ESP and rhetorical genre approaches, but between linguistic and rhetorical traditions in genre study. In Chapter 5, we will explore rhetorical genre theory, tracing its roots, current theories and approaches, and its analytical and pedagogical possibilities, and in Chapter 6, we will examine how these theories and approaches have informed the study and teaching of genre within Rhetorical Genre Studies.
5 Genre in Rhetorical and Sociological Traditions
At the end of Chapter 4, we began to draw some general distinctions between linguistic (particularly English for Specific Purposes) and rhetorical genre approaches, having to do with differences between their communicative and sociological emphases, and with the extent to which genres can and should be taught explicitly. Both linguistic and rhetorical approaches to genre—whether in the form of Systemic Functional Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, or Rhetorical Genre Studies—share a fundamental understanding of genre as inextricably tied to situation. As Aviva Freedman recently put it, “both insist on the limitations of traditional conceptions of genres which focused only on recurring textual features. Both stressed the need to recognize the social dimensions of genre. . . . Both approaches emphasize the addressee, the context, and the occasion” (“Interaction” 104). Yet while both linguistic and rhetorical genre approaches recognize genres as connecting texts and contexts, the point of emphasis and analytical/pedagogical trajectory of each approach has differed, as Freedman and others have noted (see especially Hyon, “Genre in Three Traditions”; also Hyland, “Genre-Based Pedagogies” and Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom), and these differences have had significant implications for how each tradition recognizes the work that genres do, how genres can be studied, and the ways genres can be taught and acquired.