Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy

genre has become a popular organizing principle for textbooks and course syllabi in which students examine and write texts like letters, reviews, profiles, and research papers. In many of these instances, genre has become merely a substitute for discourse modes and is presented as a fairly static and a-rhetorical text type. But approaches that could more aptly be called “genre-based” have been outlined by Bawarshi (2003) and Devitt (2004), who advocate the critical analysis of genres in the classroom. Textbooks that adopt this orientation (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2003b; Jolliffe, 1999) teach writers ways to explore genres rather than teaching students to use specific genre features.

      Genre-based approaches have enjoyed considerably more favor in second language classrooms. In attempting to address the needs of students who are often culturally and/or linguistically marginalized from sociorhetorical practices in educational, academic, and workplace settings, many practitioners have turned to genre as “a way in” to the power structures of society. The genre-based pedagogy adopted in Australia in the 1980s, for example, arose out of concerns that process pedagogy failed to serve traditionally marginalized students with its less explicit approach to writing instruction. Australian educationists like James Martin, Frances Christie, and Joan Rothery drew upon Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics to articulate a new pedagogy that aimed to make visible the underlying textual features of “genres of power.” Teaching these genres in K-12 and workplace instructional settings, practitioners in this so-called “Sydney School” see genre as a key resource for academic or workplace literacy. (See Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin, 1993a, 1993b; Martin & Rothery, 1993 for more detailed discussions of the history and curricular applications of this approach.)

      While the Sydney School approach has evolved amidst the unique concerns of the Australian educational and workplace contexts, a separate approach to genre-based pedagogy has become popular among practitioners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The most extensive work in this area has been found in ESL academic writing contexts (outlined most thoroughly by Flowerdew, 1993; Johns, 1997, 2002b; Martin, 1993b; Swales, 1990; and Swales & Feak, 1994b; Swales & Feak, 2000). A hallmark of the ESP approach to genre-centered pedagogy is its emphasis on rhetorical consciousness-raising. Genre analysis (an explicit sociorhetorical analysis of genres) has become central to a pedagogy that asks students to explore the relationship between texts and their social domains (that is, between generic form and generic content). Theoretically, this pedagogical approach appears to facilitate the development of genre knowledge for writers like international graduate students, scholars, and professionals faced with high-level writing demands in a second language; nevertheless, several criticisms have been raised against genre-centered teaching.

      Some critics of both the Australian and ESP models have pointed to the danger that teaching genres in the classroom can serve to reify the power structures in which they are embedded; these critics advocate a more critical approach through which academic norms are challenged rather than accepted (Benesch, 1995, 2001; Pennycook, 1997). Others problematize the emphasis that genre-centered approaches place on mastery of genres as access to power, overlooking the many other forms of capital (e.g., gender, race, and class) that “may significantly preclude or enable social access” (Luke, 1996, p. 329). Canagarajah’s (1996, 2003) work has also highlighted the additional non-discursive elements that can work against writers from developing countries who are disadvantaged by virtue of a system of scholarly publication largely controlled by countries like the United States and Great Britain.

      Freedman (1993a, 1993b, 1999) has further argued that discursive practices such as genres are impossible to teach, given the shifting nature of the disciplinary ideologies out of which genres evolve. Related criticisms come from a belief that generic staticity is implicit in any pedagogical application—“unless genres are static, why should they be, and how can they be, taught?” ask Freedman and Medway (1994b, p. 9). Yet, as Swales (2004) notes, such reasoning would discount the validity of much education, particularly in fields like computer science, where knowledge changes at a particularly rapid rate. While the dangers of staticity and prescriptivism are easily recognizable by teachers (Kay & Dudley-Evans, 1998), some have pointed out that there is nothing inherently prescriptive in genre-based approaches (Hyland, 2003; Swales, 1990). Less direct criticism of genre-centered ESP or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is found in arguments against the teaching of discipline-specific writing in general, as such an approach may require an understanding of disciplinary content as well as disciplinary practices of knowledge construction and dissemination—an understanding that few ESP/EAP instructors could claim outside of their own discipline (Spack, 1988).

      Related views argue that writers need to participate in a discipline in order to learn the discipline’s writing (Spack, 1988) and that genres can therefore only be acquired within the specific milieu in which they exist (Freedman, 1993a; Freedman, Adam, & Smart, 1994). These claims quite accurately emphasize the situatedness of genre learning and the very real distinctions between classroom and non-classroom writing; what they fail to account for, however, is the often fuzzy nature of the boundary between these two contexts. In many cases of ESP or EAP instruction, for example, the classroom is embedded within the larger disciplinary or professional world. Learners come to classrooms with writing tasks that they are completing in their content courses, at work, or in their independent research. They leave the writing classroom and go directly to their lab, to a study group, or even to a research conference. In a sense, the classroom is a part of the disciplinary domain in which genres are best learned; in workplace ESP, these boundaries may be even less distinguishable. Yet in both cases, there remain important differences between the classroom and non-classroom contexts, as I shall show throughout this book.

      The lively debate over the role of writing instruction in the development of genre knowledge remains important for those who teach in contexts where mastery of specialized genres is one key to success. Over a decade ago, Aviva Freedman (1993a), in a well-known impeachment of “explicit teaching”1 of genre in the classroom, called for empirical investigations of genre teaching. In a follow-up article, she reiterated this call unequivocally, stating: “It should not be the task of the skeptics to argue against a pedagogic strategy but rather the work of the proponents to bring forward convincing research and theoretical evidence—preferably before its wholesale introduction” (Freedman, 1993b, p. 279). Despite the echoing of this need for more empirical research (Hyland, 2000; Hyon, 1996; Parks, 2001; Swales, 1990, 2000), studies of genre and instruction have so far remained primarily theoretical and anecdotal. A fairly sizable number of studies have investigated how writers develop knowledge of genres and discourses through disciplinary or workplace practice, but fewer studies have looked at this development systematically within writing classrooms. Particularly lacking is research that follows the same writers as they negotiate both of these intermingling and interacting contexts (see Tardy, 2006, for a comparison of studies in various contexts).

      Practice, Task, Discourse, and Genre

      Before delving into the complicated task of defining genre knowledge and its development, I need to address what underlies the theory and practice of specialized writing. I see four constructs as fundamental: practice, task, discourse, and genre. In my view, these are somewhat parallel concepts, with practice and discourse describing broad levels of interaction and communication channels, while task and genre describe more specific, typified instances of the larger categories.

      Taking a social view of written communication, practice may be defined as doing, where the meaning and the structure of that doing is constructed by its social and historical context (Wenger, 1998). Examples of practice include conducting research, reading, and writing. Through practice, writers interact with the artifacts and people within the given sociohistorical contexts, making meaning and building knowledge (Prior, 1998). A related concept is that of activity, such as participation in monthly laboratory meetings, collaboration on a journal article, or presentation of a conference paper. These events are defined by their sociohistorical context, their goals, and the “tools” and “objects” (e.g., genres or technology) used to carry out those goals. The term activity is associated with Vygotskyan sociocultural perspectives on learning, in which “object-directed, tool-mediated” interactions are referred to as activity systems (Russell, 1997). Activity has served as a powerful theoretical construct for many ethnographic studies of writers and writing contexts. However, I will limit its use throughout this book—at