features of different academic and workplace genres so that these can be taught more realistically.
We will conclude this section with a brief discussion of how historical and corpus linguistic approaches to genre have informed the way we understand language change by positing genres as the locus of such change (Diller 31). For example, in his study of the adverbial first participle construction in English, Thomas Kohnen describes how that construction first appeared in and then spread through English via its use in different genres. The adverbial first participle first appeared in the English religious treatise and then soon afterward spread to the sermon (Kohnen 116). What is telling is that the adverbial first participle achieved a certain status by virtue of first appearing in prestigious and powerful religious genres, which then acted as catalysts for linguistic change (Kohnen 111). As Diller explains, “the presence of a form in a prestigious genre may prompt its reception in other genres and thus speed up its diffusion throughout the (written) language” (33). Amy Devitt has likewise demonstrated how genre is a significant variable in language change (Writing Genres 124). In her study of how Anglo-English became diffused through Scots-English, Devitt found that Anglicization did not occur evenly throughout Scottish English, but rather occurred “at quite different rates in different genres” (126). Anglicization occurred most rapidly, for example, within religious treatises, and the least rapidly within public records. This suggests that genres can be understood as sites of contestation within histories of language change. While religious treatises anglicized more quickly because of the power of the Church of England, public records, Devitt explains, were more resistant because they “represent the remnants of the political power that Scotland until recently had retained within its own political bodies. The Privy Council may not have much legislative power anymore, but its records can still reflect that older Scots identity through using its older Scots language” (131). Such studies reveal the extent to which genres mediate relations of power historically and linguistically, in ways that enrich the study and teaching of genre. In the next chapter, we will examine the ways that English for Specific Purposes has added to the study and teaching of genre by emphasizing the interaction between discourse community, communicative purpose, and genre.
4 Genre in Linguistic Traditions: English for Specific Purposes
This chapter provides an overview of genre study within English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a field that bridges linguistic and rhetorical traditions. We will begin by defining ESP and identifying key similarities and differences between ESP and Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approaches to genre, and then we will describe how ESP approaches have drawn on linguistic traditions in the process of developing their methods of applied genre study and teaching. We will examine these approaches, track major developments and critiques over the last twenty years, and then conclude by anticipating how ESP genre approaches relate to but also differ from more rhetorical and sociological approaches to genre, the subject of Chapters 5 and 6.
Positioned within the overarching category of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), English for Specific Purposes focuses on studying and teaching specialized varieties of English, most often to non-native speakers of English, in advanced academic and professional settings. ESP is often used as an umbrella term to include more specialized areas of study such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Occupational Purposes (EOP), and English for Medical Purposes (EMP). Although ESP has existed since the 1960s and although ESP researchers began to use genre analysis as a research and pedagogical tool in the 1980s, it was John Swales’ groundbreaking book Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings that most fully theorized and developed the methodology for bringing genre analysis into ESP research and teaching. It is largely due to Swales’ work and the research it has inspired over the last twenty years that ESP and genre analysis have become in many ways synonymous (see Belcher, Cheng).
Swales begins Genre Analysis by identifying two key characteristics of ESP genre approaches, namely their focus on academic and research English (which would be expanded to include occupational English), and their use of genre analysis for applied ends. The applied nature of ESP has been a defining feature of the field from its inception. As Swales explains, ESP approaches can be traced to “quantitative studies of the linguistic properties . . . of registers of a language” for the purpose of identifying the frequency of occurrence of certain linguistic features in a particular register and then making these features the focus of language instruction (Genre Analysis 2). Early work in ESP thus resembled research in corpus linguistics with its quantitative studies of the linguistic properties of language varieties, and to this day research in corpus linguistics continues to influence ESP genre research (Belcher 168; Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 119-20). As Swales notes, however, ESP studies since the 1960s have “concomitantly become narrower and deeper” than those early quantitative studies (3). They are narrower in the sense that the focus has shifted from broader register categories such as “scientific” or “medical” language to a narrower focus on actual genre varieties used within, say, scientific and medical disciplines (Swales, Genre Analysis 3). At the same time, ESP analyses have also become deeper in the sense that they not only describe linguistic features of language varieties but also their communicative purposes and effects. This “deeper or multi-layered textual account,” Swales explains, signaled an interest in “assessing rhetorical purposes, in unpacking information structures and in accounting for syntactic and lexical choices” (3). It is in their focus on describing and determining linguistic effects that ESP genre approaches help bridge linguistic and rhetorical studies of genre.
ESP and SFL: Similarities and Distinctions
ESP’s expanded interest from descriptive analyses of linguistic features to analyses of genres and their communicative functions not only helps distinguish ESP research from corpus linguistics (for more on this distinction, see Tardy and Swales, “Form, Text Organization, Genre, Coherence, and Cohesion”),8 but also reveals similarities and distinctions between ESP genre analyses and systemic functional linguistic genre analyses. There are several ways in which SFL and ESP genre approaches compare to and differ from one another. They both share the fundamental view that linguistic features are connected to social context and function. And they are both driven by the pedagogical imperative to make visible to disadvantaged students the connections between language and social function that genres embody. Such a “visible pedagogy,” according to Ken Hyland, “seeks to offer writers an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured and why they are written the way they are,” thereby making “clear what is to be learned rather than relying on hit-or-miss inductive methods” (Genre and Second Language Writing 11). Both ESP and SFL genre approaches are also committed to the idea that this kind of explicit teaching of relevant genres provides access to disadvantaged learners. As Hyland elaborates, “the teaching of key genres is, therefore, a means of helping learners gain access to ways of communicating that accrued cultural capital in particular professional, academic, and occupational communities. By making the genres of power visible and attainable through explicit instruction, genre pedagogies seek to demystify the kinds of writing that will enhance learners’ career opportunities and provide access to a greater range of life choices” (“Genre-based Pedagogies” 24).
While SFL and ESP genre approaches share analytical strategies and pedagogical commitments, they differ in subtle but important ways. Most obviously, they differ in their applied target audience, with SFL genre approaches generally targeting economically and culturally disadvantaged school-age children in Australia, as we saw in the previous chapter, and ESP genre approaches generally targeting more advanced, often graduate-level, international students in British and U.S. universities, who, as non-native speakers of English, are linguistically disadvantaged. This difference in target audience has important implications for how SFL and ESP approaches perceive and analyze target genres. Because both approaches teach explicitly “genres often assumed to be tacitly acquired via the normal progression of academic acculturation” but denied disadvantaged students (Belcher 169), the question of which genres to teach becomes crucial. Primary and secondary school students are not often, if ever, asked to write in what would be considered disciplinary or professional genres. As a result, SFL scholars and teachers have tended to
