The Language Teacher
05 - 2003

What is Genre and Why is It Useful for Language Teachers?

Kim Bradford-Watts

OIU, Ryukoku University



What is Genre?

According to Swales (1990),

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community. (p. 58)

The underlying premise of this approach is that any linguistic act is a social or communicative event in that it occurs at a particular time in a particular place and between particular people for a particular purpose.

Everyone engages in these events. If, for example, you go shopping for shoes, you will expect the interaction to be fairly consistent with your past experiences of shopping for shoes. You will expect some kind of acknowledgement or greeting, to have your questions answered about availability of your size and preferred color, to be told the price, and finally to be thanked for your business. Not all of these may occur (you may find the perfect size and color immediately and not need to ask any questions), and they may not occur in this order. If, however, you go shopping for a car, you would expect this service encounter to be somewhat more complex, involving explanations of features and add-ons, as well as financing options.

In the shoe-shopping example above, your expectations are determined by your wanting to procure shoes (purpose) in the year 2003 AD (rather than in the years 1500 BC, 1945 AD, or 3000 AD), in Sydney (rather than Moscow, Bali, or Tehran), in a shop with a shop assistant (rather than a supermarket with a checkout, for example). If you change any of these conditions, the interaction between you and the person from whom you wish to procure the shoes would change--the text produced would be different.

This is similar for written texts: love letters to your life partner, advertisements for local plumbers, posted lists of rules for the use of the gym, essays, newspaper editorials, obituaries, and doctoral theses. Each of these examples is written at a time, in a place, for a purpose, by one or more writers for a defined reader.

What is Genre Analysis?

Genre analysis is a developing multi-disciplinary approach to the study of texts, both verbal and written, drawing from studies in Linguistics, Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology. Genre analysts look for the common patterns of grammar usage, key vocabulary, and text structure in particular text types.

There are many examples of genre analysis. Bhatia (1993) analyses a wide range of written texts, including sales promotion letters, job applications, research article abstracts, introductions in student academic writings, legislative provisions, and legal cases. McCarthy (2000) describes close-contact verbal encounters at a hairdresser's. Kuiper and Flindall (2000) discuss the role of small talk and where it is situated in the service encounter genre at the supermarket in New Zealand.

It is important to note that genres are not fixed. They change over time, reflecting changes in society. Several recent studies are concerned, for example, with the developing genres of the Internet. Giordano (2001) discusses genres developing in chat rooms and discussion groups. Bradford-Watts (2001) analyses online movie reviews and email confirmations of online orders. Both document the development of new genres.

What is the Relevance of Genre to Language Teaching?

Paltridge (2001) states, "The notion of genre...provides a basis for extending current syllabus models, as well as for selecting and sequencing syllabus items and, in turn, focusing on them in the language learning classroom" (p. 9), since it

incorporates vocabulary and grammatical structures that are typically associated with functional-notional approaches to syllabus design; a focus on situation, social activities, and topic that derives from situational and content-based syllabuses; and a focus on specific language learning tasks and activities that draws from task-based and procedural approaches to language teaching and learning. (Paltridge, 2001, p. 9)

In other words, using genre as a starting point in curriculum design by listing genres necessary for student understanding within a context--typical in content-based curricula--allows the teacher to (a) collect real samples of appropriate texts, (b) design activities to foster understanding of the genre, (c) draw attention to key vocabulary and grammatical structures associated with that genre, and (d) demonstrate to the students how these interact with the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the text in terms of situation and context, allowing the relationship between culture and language to be directly addressed. Tasks give students the opportunity to experiment with the genre, manipulating their texts to accommodate changes which can be expected to occur with variation of contextual factors. Tasks also give teachers an opportunity to monitor students and take advantage of teachable moments that arise to increase student awareness of sociocultural factors which affect choice of form within the context. A genre-based course is, essentially, an outcome-based course, with the aim being explicit student awareness of and proficiency in the target genres. It allows teachers to focus on both form and meaning, as well as how meanings are made.

An important reason to consider genre-based instruction is that of empowerment: If students are able to understand, access and manipulate genres, they acquire "cultural capital" (Hammond & Mackin-Horarick, 1999, in Paltridge, 2001, p. 8). Not teaching this explicitly denies students the means to participate in and challenge the cultures of power they will encounter when interacting with members of the target culture.

How can Genre be Applied in the Foreign Language Classroom?

How can this be applied in our classrooms? Imagine that you are assigned a conversation class for low-level first-year university students who have vocabulary and grammatical patterns retained from their junior and senior high school years. What do they need to be able to participate in a conversation? What kinds of conversation are they likely to encounter? Burns and Joyce (1997, in Paltridge, 2001, p. 20) identify seven steps when creating a genre-based program:

  1. Identify the overall context in language use.
  2. Develop goals or aims.
  3. Note the sequence of language events within the particular context.
  4. List the genres arising from this sequence.
  5. Outline the sociocultural knowledge that students need in the particular communicative context.
  6. Record or gather samples of the genres on which the course will focus.
  7. Develop units of work related to these genres and develop the learning objectives to be achieved.

In our conversation class situation, these steps may resemble the following:

  1. Conversation occurs between strangers, acquaintances, close friends, family members and in work and other social situations. It includes small talk, explanations, story telling, giving opinions, asking questions, comparing and contrasting, etc.
  2. Goals include users being able to employ appropriate semiotic, explanatory, and pragmatic features in scaffolding conversation to such genres as narrative, anecdote, recount, and opinion (see Eggins & Slade, 1997, for examples of these genres).
  3. See Eggins and Slade (1997) for sequence of language events.
  4. See Eggins and Slade (1997) for lists of genres.
  5. Students need to know about openings and closings, topic management, feedback and back-channels, turn-taking, repair and schematic structures (Paltridge, 2001), small-talk topics and appropriateness, register, appropriateness and use of apologies, excuses, giving advice, etc.
  6. Find transcriptions of conversations using the above, record conversations with/of your friends, families, or colleagues to illustrate the use of elements in #5.
  7. Develop units of work, including activities, which would expose and practice context, discourse structure and language for each of the goals chosen. These could include preparation activities, using culture notes, cross-cultural awareness activities, using color-coding to highlight structural features, paraphrasing, examining real texts, giving feedback on performance, explaining, and grammatical consciousness-raising (Paltridge, 2001). Many of these activities are of the kind that we use in communicative classrooms as a matter of course, but in a genre-based course they are used to extend the scaffolding of the learner's awareness of the genre to existing knowledge.

This is just one small example of how genre study can benefit the communicative classroom. For further examples of how genre-based courses are being implemented, please refer to the following three sources: Bhatia (1993) concentrates on ESP curriculum and applications; Paltridge (2001) describes several different applications over a wide variety of classroom situations and includes detailed lists of activities from which to draw in your own planning; and finally Crane, Galvanek, Liamkina, and Ryshina-Pankova (2002) discuss the role of genre in the German Department at Georgetown University.

References

Bhatia, V. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. New York: Longman.
Bradford-Watts, K. (2001). Six texts, two genres: An analysis. Bulletin of Research Institute for Foreign Education, No.10, Kyoto Tachibana Women's University.
Crane, C., Galvanek J., Liamkina O., & Ryshina-Pankova, M. (2002, March). Genre: Where art thou? Tracing the role of genre in the foreign language curriculum. Paper presented at the UC Consortium Conference on Language Learning and Teaching, Irvine, CA. Retrieved from uccllt.ucdavis.edu/hli/papers/Crane,etal.Irvine2002Paper.htm.
Eggins, S., & Slade, D. (1997). Analysing casual conversation. London: Cassell.
Giordano, R. (2001, June). The genre of electronic communication: A virtual barbecue revisited. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, New York University, New York, NY. Retrieved from www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ach_allc2001/papers/giordano.
Kuiper, K., & Flindall, M. (2000). Social rituals, formulaic speech and small talk at the supermarket checkout. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk. Singapore: Pearson.
McCarthy, M. (2000). Mutually captive audiences: Small talk and the genre of close-contact service encounters. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk. Singapore: Pearson.
Paltridge, B. (2001). Genre and the language learning classroom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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