The Language Teacher
July 2000
Writing Across Genres
Chris Gallagher
Some years ago, Percival (1982) published a very successful
research report. His "research" explored a variety of breakfast
cereals in terms of their "crunch factor" and how this factor
interfered with foreign students' understanding of spoken English at breakfast
tables. Although the report was in fact a spoof, it was an excellent model
of a research report and has even been used for teaching the purpose, generic
structure and grammatical features of this genre of writing. This case demonstrates
that written genres exist not just as the inventions of linguists, but for
specific human social purposes. Percival used the genre to make fun of the
field itself, but without the existence of the genre, and his ability to
manipulate it, he would have been unable to achieve the same impact.
Genre literacy, which developed mostly in Australia during the last decade, is an attempt to create a new pedagogic space in the writing classroom, and is underpinned by the language descriptions of Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994). In essence it involves a methodology for teaching how a text "hangs together" and creates meaning in its particular context of use. Because of its emphasis on texts, and not sentences, it moves beyond traditional literacy pedagogies that stress formal correctness. It also goes beyond the process pedagogies which stress "natural" learning through "doing" writing (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993). This is not to say that grammar, or the enabling effect of students learning to write by actually writing are ignored -- far from it. Instead, it is an approach that raises students' awareness of the linguistic features of a genre and thus allows them to develop literacy across a variety of genres they will encounter in any curriculum, or even in non-school environments.
A genre-based approach to writing is of particular relevance to Japanese students of English. The focus on sentence-level grammar in Japanese English education is legendary in our field, and although they still have problems 'within' the sentence, it is "above" the sentence that presents the greatest challenge for students, particularly when they are placed in a school environment in which they are required to create "whole" texts such as essays, reports, and summaries, to mention just a few most typical genres in college settings. The students often produce incoherent texts which also lack the cohesion necessary for these kind of genres. Attempts to work from the student's text toward the genre often fail because matters of correction are paramount in many writing programs, not the creation of authentic genres. It also is difficult to insert a genre structure into a text after it has been created; a little like trying to insert a recipe into a dish that was created without reference to one. In much the same way as the ingredients, procedure and flavor define a dish, the creation of a text is the result of a combination of linguistic resources for a particular communicative purpose.
Consequently, an integral aspect of a genre approach is working with texts from the beginning; authentic texts that represent genres that are used outside the language classroom. Quite often, in dealing with the complexities of teaching writing to second-language students of English, it is possible to get so caught up with matters of process and correctness that the importance of modeling language in use can be overlooked. A genre approach requires that before attempting to write in a particular genre, the students have been exposed to the genre by reading, analyzing and discussing examples of it. The interconnection between reading and writing is stressed in most language programs, though often the genre of the reading is different to that which the students are required to write. For example, students might be asked to write a critique of a short story, without having first had the genre of a critique modeled for them. In this case, of course, the source text will supply the students with language that enables them to write the critique, but the generic features of a critique would clearly not be evident in the short story itself. It should be pointed out also that a genre approach is not a matter of applying formulaic prescriptions of how a text should be structured. Instead, it is based on an analysis of how a text creates meaning in its context of use and then how this knowledge can be utilized by students to write in the same genre themselves.
It may appear from the above that a genre approach is only suitable in a college or university setting. However this is not the case. Work on genre literacy in Australia began with the Disadvantaged Schools Project in Sydney, spearheaded by Jim Martin (1986), and has been applied successfully to all levels of school literacy including kindergarten and high school. An essential aim of the genre approach is to determine what kind of texts are valued (and why?), and also to make these genres accessible to students in both reading and writing. By doing this, students are able to understand the purpose of each genre and its place within a set of genres and this allows students to deal with language shifts of various kinds, a skill most native speakers are well acquainted with.
References
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. London: The Falmer Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed). London: Edward Arnold.
Martin, J.R. (1986). Intervening in the Process of Writing Development. In Painter, C. & Martin, J.R. (Eds.), Writing to Mean: Teaching Genres across the Curriculum. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia: Occasional Papers, 9, 11-43.
Percival, P. (1982). Intermittent Masticatory Noise as a Determinant of Foreign Language Comprehension. World Language English, 1 (4). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
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