Genre and Second Language Writing

1. Why Genre?

Chapter 1 Why Genre? Genre is a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations. For many people, it is an intuitively attractive concept that helps to organize the common-sense labels we use to categorize texts and the situations in which they occur. The concept of genre is based on the idea that members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognizing similarities in the texts they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such texts to read, understand, and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is, in part, because writing is a practice based on expectations : the reader’s chances of interpreting the writer’s purpose are increased if the writer takes the trouble to anticipate what the reader might be expecting based on previous texts he or she has read of the same kind. Hoey (2001) likens readers and writers to dancers following each other’s steps, each assembling sense from a text by anticipating what the other is likely to do by making connections to prior texts. While writing, like dancing, allows for creativity and the unexpected, established patterns often form the basis of any variations. We know immediately, for example , whether a text is a recipe, a joke, or a love letter and can respond to it immediately and even construct a similar one if we need to. As teachers, we are able to engage in more specialized genres such as lesson plans, student reports, and class examinations, bringing a degree of expertise to the ways we understand or write familiar texts. In more precise terms, we possess a schema of prior knowledge that we share with 4 others and can bring to the situations in which we read and write to express ourselves efficiently and effectively. Today, genre is one of the most important and influential concepts in language education, signifying what Ann Johns (2002, p. 3) has recently referred to as “a major paradigm shift” in literacy studies and teaching. We will return to a more detailed discussion of what genre is in chapter 2, but it might be useful here, at the beginning of a book about genre, to ask why there has been such a shift. What is it about genre that gives it such a central place in current writing theory and teaching? This chapter sets out to answer this question, raising some of the main advantages and problems with genre and placing it in the context of current L2 writing teaching. Genre-Based Writing Teaching Genre-based teaching is concerned with what learners do when they write. An understanding of the concept allows writing teachers to identify the kinds of texts that students will have to write in their target occupational, academic, or social contexts and to organize their courses to meet these needs. Curriculum materials and activities are therefore devised to support learners by drawing on texts and tasks directly related to the skills they need to participate effectively in the world outside the ESL classroom. For writing teachers, genre pedagogies promise very real benefits. The concept of genre enables teachers to look beyond content, composing processes, and textual forms to see writing as an attempt to communicate with readers—to better understand the ways that language patterns are used to accomplish coherent, purposeful prose. Genre adherents argue that people don’t just write, they write something to achieve some purpose: writing is a way of getting things done. To get things done, to tell a story, request an overdraft, craft an essay, describe a technical process, and so on, we follow certain social Why Genre? 5 conventions for organizing messages, and these conventions can be described and taught. For writing teachers, therefore, genre is a useful concept because it pulls together language, content, and contexts, offering teachers a means of presenting students with explicit and systematic explanations of the ways writing works to communicate. It is important to note that genre approaches to writing instruction do not represent a single set of teaching techniques that can simply be followed in a paint-by-numbers fashion in every classroom. Students have different proficiencies, motivations , goals, and language needs. They study in contexts where English is taught as a second or foreign language,1 and they learn to write for different purposes and in different genres . But while genre is a term that...