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.