literacy teaching, with its emphasis on “learning through doing.” Such an approach, its critics argued, ignores the contexts in which texts are acquired and function, in ways that naturalize and privatize what is actually a social process of literacy acquisition. As such, process approaches deprive students of access to the systemic, patterned textual choices that function within different contexts of situation. Far from empowering students via a student-centered approach that encourages student expression and discovery, process approaches instead reproduce social inequality by denying traditionally marginalized students access to academic and cultural texts. As Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis explain, process-based approaches are actually “culture bound;” with their focus on student agency and ownership, the power of voice and expression, student control and motivation, such approaches reflect and privilege the “cultural aspirations of middle-class children from child-centered households” (6). By the same token, “its pedagogy of immersion ‘naturally’ favours students whose voice is closest to the literate culture of power in industrial society” (6). In short, by keeping textual structures and their social functions hidden, process approaches exclude even further those students whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds leave them on the margins of the dominant culture. An explicit focus on genre in literacy teaching, its proponents argue, helps counter such imbalance by revealing the relationship between text structures and social purposes in ways that enable all students to produce texts more effectively and critically.
Beginning in the early 1980s with research that examined children’s writing in Australian elementary and secondary school classrooms, and extended in the early 1990s through research related to the New South Wales Department of Education’s Disadvantaged Schools Program, SFL approaches to genre have been influenced most widely by the work of J.R. Martin, who has helped define genres as “staged, goal-oriented social processes through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives” (“Analysing” 43). As further explained in Martin, Christie, and Rothery, genres function as social processes “because members of a culture interact with each other to achieve them; as goal-oriented because they have evolved to get things done; and as staged because it usually takes more than one step for participants to achieve their goals” (59).
Martin builds on Halliday’s work by locating genre in relation to register so that genre and register relate to and realize one another in important ways. According to Martin, while register functions on the level of context of situation, genre functions on the level of context of culture. The relationship can be diagrammed as follows:
In such a model, genre connects culture to situation, and register connects situation to language, or, as Martin puts it, “register (encompassing field, tenor and mode) contextualizes language and is in turn contextualized by genre” (“Analysing” 37).
Martin’s formulation enriches our understanding of genre by showing how social purposes/motives are linked to text structures, and how these are realized as situated social and linguistic actions within register. Indeed, this has been the most common trajectory in SFL genre analysis: Moving from the identification of social purpose as represented in generic structural elements (involving the analysis of what Hasan calls “generic structure potential”—the range of staging possibilities within a particular genre) (Eggins and Martin 240);6 to the analysis of a text’s register as represented in field, tenor, and mode; to language metafunctions; to more micro analyses of semantic, lexico-grammatic, and phonological/graphological features.
Within Australian genre pedagogy, Martin’s view of genre has been used as part of the influential LERN (Literacy and Education Research Network) project. The project set out to identify what genres were the most important within school literacy (and has since been expanded to include adult migrant ESL settings and workplace settings), and to develop pedagogy to teach those genres most critically and effectively (Cope and Kalantzis 9). That pedagogy has come to be known as the “teaching-learning cycle,” represented in the shape of a wheel. The teaching-learning cycle has been adapted by various researchers (for example, see Macken et al; Hammond et al; Rothery; Feez and Joyce), but its basic components include three stages: modeling, joint negotiation of text, and independent construction of text. In the first stage, students are exposed to a number of texts representing a given genre. During this stage, students and teacher identify the cultural and situational context in which texts in the genre function, what social purposes they serve, how their structural elements reflect their functions, and how their language features carry out their functions. As such, the first stage moves from discussion of context and social purpose to a description/analysis of register and language. In the second stage, students and teacher engage in the joint negotiation and then construction of a text within the genre, first conducting research, developing content knowledge, note-taking, observing, diagramming, and then working to collaboratively produce a version of the genre. In the final stage, students independently construct a version of the genre by conducting research to develop content knowledge, drafting the text, conferencing with teacher and peers, editing, evaluating, and publishing their text (Cope and Kalantzis 10-11). The cyclical shape of the model is meant to reflect its flexibility, so that teachers can enter into the model at the stage most appropriate to students’ level of preparedness (Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 30-31). At the same time, it is meant to reflect how students and teacher can keep rotating through the cycle as more and more complex genres are added. The teaching-learning cycle, thus, makes visible to students the structural and linguistic features of genres, and how these features are connected to social function.
The teaching-learning cycle and the SFL view of genre upon which it is based have not been immune from critique, on either the pedagogical or theoretical fronts. On the pedagogical front, scholars such as Gunther Kress, Bill Cope, and Mary Kalantzis have raised concerns about the degree of formalism exhibited by such an approach, in which generic models and structural analysis are used to teach students how to write texts “correctly” (Cope and Kalantzis 12). Kress also raises concern about the classifying impulse behind Martin et al’s approach to genre, in which genres are classified and then modeled to students as though they were givens. By starting with model texts and examining the social purposes embodied within them, such an approach ignores the material/social relations and contexts that may not be visible in the text’s structure and features, but that play an important role in how and why the text functions the way it does (Cope and Kalantzis 14). Pedagogically, critics worry that such an approach to genre teaching promotes a “linear transmission pedagogy” in which “textual form is largely presented in an uncritical way at the modeling stage” for students to emulate (Cope and Kalantzis 15). As Cope and Kalantzis explain, “The cycle imagery . . . belies the fact that the underlying pedagogical process is linear. Not only is this a reincarnation of the transmission pedagogy but it also takes genres at their word and posits their powerfulness uncritically, solely on the grounds that they should be taught to groups of students historically marginalized by the school literacy” (15). This approach, they fear, can easily lead to a “cultural assimilationist model of education” (16).
In an updated version of the Teaching Learning Cycle that attempts to address some of these concerns, Feez and Joyce add a separate category called “Building the Context” which precedes text modeling. The context building stage of the cycle employs ethnographic strategies for “learners to experience and explore the cultural and situational aspects of the social context of the target text” (Feez 66). Such strategies include research, interviews, field trips, role-playing, and cross-cultural comparisons.
On the theoretical front, critics have raised concerns about SFL’s view of genre and its trajectory, moving as it does from social purpose/text structure to register analysis to linguistic analysis. While Martin is careful to note that genre realizes ideology, which he defines as the “system of coding orientations engendering subjectivity—at a higher level of abstraction than genre” (“Analysing” 40), and while Christie and Martin have acknowledged the role of genre “in the social construction of experience” (Genres and Institutions 32), the SFL model, critics note, does not examine the ways in which genres not only realize
