and ESL/EFL”).9 For ESP scholars and teachers working with advanced students whose academic disciplines and professional/occupational settings are more bounded and where the genres used within those contexts are more identifiable, the analytical and pedagogical focus has been on actual, community-identified genres used within those disciplinary settings—genres such as research articles, literature reviews, conference abstracts, research presentations, grant proposals, job application letters, academic lectures, various medical texts, legislative documents, and so on.
The differences in target audience and genre focus between SFL and ESP approaches highlight a related difference in understandings of context. Because SFL approaches generally focus on pre-genres, they have tended to define context at a fairly macro level. As we discussed in the previous chapter, SFL genre approaches locate genre at the level of “context of culture.” ESP genre approaches, however, locate genres within more specifically defined contexts (what Swales first termed “discourse communities”), where the genres’ communicative purposes are more specified and attributable. As we will discuss next, defining genre in relation to discourse community has had important implications for ESP genre approaches, allowing ESP scholars to focus on context and communicative/rhetorical purpose. At the same time, defining genre in relation to discourse community has to some degree also shifted the pedagogical purpose of ESP approaches away from the more overtly political, empowerment-motivated goals of SFL genre-based teaching to a more pragmatic, acculturation-motivated pedagogy aimed at helping advanced non-native English speaking students acquire “knowledge of relevant genres so they can act effectively in their target contexts” (Hyland, “Genre-based Pedagogies” 22).
Discourse Community, Communicative Purpose, and Genre
Three key and inter-related concepts—discourse community, communicative purpose, and genre—frame Swales’ approach to genre study. Swales defines discourse communities as “sociorhetorical networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals” (Genre Analysis 9). These common goals become the basis for shared communicative purposes, with genres enabling discourse community members to achieve these communicative purposes (9).
In Genre Analysis, Swales proposes six defining characteristics of discourse communities. First, “a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals” which can either be explicitly stated or tacitly understood (24-25). Second, in order to achieve and further its goals, a discourse community must have “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members” such as meeting rooms or telecommunications technologies or newsletters, etc. (25). Third, membership within a discourse community depends on individuals using these mechanisms to participate in the life of the discourse community (26). Fourth, “a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims” (26). These genres must be recognizable to and defined by members of a discourse community (26). Five, “in addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis” which can take the form of “increasingly shared and specialized terminology” such as abbreviations and acronyms (26). Finally, “a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” who can pass on knowledge of shared goals and communicative purposes to new members (27). As such, genres not only help members of a discourse community to achieve and further their goals; genres also help new members acquire and become initiated into a discourse community’s shared goals, hence the value of genre as a teaching tool within ESP.
By proposing that a genre “comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (58; emphasis added), Swales defines genres first and foremost as linguistic and rhetorical actions, involving the use of language to communicate something to someone at some time in some context for some purpose. While a communicative event can be random or idiosyncratic, motivated by a unique, distinct purpose, a genre represents a class of communicative events that has formed in response to some shared set of communicative purposes. A genre, therefore, is a relatively stable class of linguistic and rhetorical “events” which members of a discourse community have typified in order to respond to and achieve shared communicative goals.
Swales is careful to note that “exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality” (49), meaning that a text’s genre membership is not defined by “either/or” essential properties but rather along a spectrum of family resemblances, as we discussed in the section on Genre and Historical/Corpus Linguistics in the previous chapter. Since, according to Swales, “communicative purpose has been nominated as the privileged property of a genre” (52), a genre prototype is determined by how closely it corresponds to its communicative purpose. From there, as Swales explains, “[o]ther properties, such as form, structure and audience expectations operate to identify the extent to which an exemplar is prototypical of a particular genre” (52). As such, it is the rationale behind the genre that “shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style” (58). In short, the rationale determines a genre’s allowable range of substantive, structural, syntactic, and lexical choices, and the extent to which a text exists within this range will define its genre membership.
Because a genre’s rationale as well as it schematic, syntactic, and lexical conventions are all defined against the backdrop of a discourse community’s shared goals, how members of a discourse community define genres is important to how genre analysts understand their function and structure. For this reason, ESP genre analyses, more so than SFL analyses, rely on a discourse community’s “nomenclature for genres [as] an important source of insight” (Swales 54). Such naming, as Swales suggests, can provide valuable ethnographic information into how and why members of discourse communities use genres. However, as we will examine later in this chapter, although research such as Ann John’s important work combining genre analysis and ethnography (1997) and Swales’ “textographic” study of a university building (1998) employ ethnographic strategies, the extent to which ethnographic approaches have played (or should play) a role in ESP genre analyses and the purposes for which such approaches have been used remain subject to debate.
ESP Approaches to Genre Analysis
Because it is communicative purpose (defined in relation to a discourse community’s shared goals) that gives rise to and provides the rationale for a genre and shapes its internal structure, communicative purpose often serves as a starting point for ESP genre analyses. A typical ESP approach to genre analysis, for example, will begin by identifying a genre within a discourse community and defining the communicative purpose the genre is designed to achieve. From there, the analysis turns to an examination of the genre’s organization—its schematic structure—often characterized by the rhetorical “moves” it undertakes, and then to an examination of the textual and linguistic features (style, tone, voice, grammar, syntax) that realize the rhetorical moves. The trajectory of the analysis thus proceeds from a genre’s schematic structure to its lexico-grammatic features, all the while attending to the genre’s communicative purpose and the discourse community which defines it. The process is by no means linear or static, but generally speaking, it has tended to move from context to text (Flowerdew 91-92), with context providing knowledge of communicative purpose and discourse community members’ genre identifications.
In Analysing Genre: Language in Professional Settings, Vijay Bhatia outlines seven steps to analyzing genres, which reflect the trajectory described above. Not all ESP genre researchers will follow all these steps, and not always in the order Bhatia outlines, but together these steps provide insight into the range of ways ESP genre researchers go about conducting genre analyses in academic and professional contexts. The first step involves placing a given genre-text in its situational context. Step two involves surveying the existing research on the genre (22). With the genre identified and contextualized, step three involves refining the researcher’s understanding of the genre’s discourse community. This includes identifying the writers and readers who use the genre and determining their goals and relationships to one another, as well as the material conditions in which they function—in short, identifying the “reality” which the genre represents
