context in which the genre takes place (24) in order to gain “naturalistic” insight into the conditions in which members of a discourse community use the genre. Step six moves from context to text, and involves the decision regarding which level of linguistic analysis to explore: lexico-grammatical features (for example, quantitative/statistical study of tenses, clauses, and other syntactic properties, including stylistic analysis) (25-26), text-patterning (for example, the patterns in which language is used in a particular genre, such as how and why noun phrases and nominalizations are used in different genres), and structural interpretation (for example, the structural “moves” a genre utilizes to achieve its goals, such as the three-move CARS [Creating a Research Space] structure of research article introductions as described by Swales). In the final step, Bhatia advises researchers to seek a specialist informant from the research site to verify findings (34).
While the extent to which step five (conducting an ethnography) is utilized in ESP genre approaches varies both in terms of its frequency and specificity, in general Bhatia’s methodology for genre analysis describes the trajectory that most ESP genre approaches have taken, moving from context to textual analysis and, at the textual level, applying various levels of linguistic analyses, from lexico-grammatical features to language patterns to larger structural patterns. Swales’ well-known and influential analysis of the research article in Genre Analysis generally exemplifies these levels of linguistic, textual, and structural analyses. For example, in analyzing research article (RA) introductions, Swales first identifies the typical “moves” authors make within the introduction (Swales and Feak have defined a “move” as a “bounded communicative act that is designed to achieve one main communicative objective” within the larger communicative objective of the genre) (35): from “establishing a territory” (move 1) to “establishing a niche” (move 2) to “occupying the niche” (move 3) (141). Within each of these moves, Swales identifies a range of possible “steps” RA authors can take, such as “claiming centrality” and “reviewing items of previous research” in move 1 and “counter-claiming” or “indicating a gap” in move 2. From there, Swales examines steps more specifically by analyzing text-patterning and lexico-grammatical features within different steps. In analyzing step 3 (reviewing items of previous research) within move 1 (establishing a territory), for instance, Swales looks at patterns of citation, noting patterns in which RA authors either name the researcher being cited in their citing sentence or reference the researcher in parenthesis at the end of the sentence or in end notes. Moving from text-patterning to lexico-grammatical features, Swales then identifies the frequency of “reporting verbs” (such as “show,” “establish,” “claim,” etc.) that RA authors use “to introduce previous researchers and their findings” (150).
This general approach to genre analysis within ESP—from identifying purpose to analyzing a genre’s rhetorical moves and how these moves are carried out textually and linguistically—and the research that has emerged from it has contributed greatly to our knowledge of discipline-specific genres, notably research articles as well as what Swales has called “occluded genres” that operate behind the scenes of research articles (genres such as abstracts, submission letters, review letters, etc.). Such knowledge has enabled graduate-level non-native speakers of English to gain access to and participate in academic and professional discourse communities (Swales, “Occluded Genres” 46).10
Recent Developments in ESP Genre Study
Over the past twenty years (see Diane Belcher’s “Trends”), ESP genre research has focused on issues related to communicative purpose, context, and the dynamic, intertextual nature of genres. Eleven years after the publication of Swales’ Genre Analysis, Inger Askehave and John Swales, reflecting on the notion of “communicative purpose” in light of more complex, dynamic understandings of context and cognition, wonder if “’communicative purpose’ has assumed a taken-for-granted status, a convenient but under-considered starting point for the analyst” (197). They point to research that “has, in various ways, established that . . . purposes, goals, or public outcomes are more evasive, multiple, layered, and complex than originally envisaged” (197), and note how genre researches such as Bhatia had already recognized that while genre conventions constrain “allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form, and functional value, . . . these constraints . . . are often exploited by the expert members of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of socially recognized purpose(s)” (Bhatia 13). Askehave and Swales acknowledge that “we are no longer looking at a simple enumerable list or ‘set’ of communicative purposes, but at a complexly layered one, wherein some purposes are not likely to be officially ‘acknowledged’ by the institution, even if they may be ‘recognized’—particularly in off-record situations—by some of its expert members” (199).
In an effort to account for the complexity of communicative purpose, Askehave and Swales suggest that researchers begin with a provisional identification of genre purpose and then “repurpose” the genre after more “extensive text-in-context inquiry” (208). For example, in his recent study of research genres, Swales examines the use of humor in dissertation defenses, arguing that the use of humor enables the achievement of the more serious purposes of the dissertation defense: The purpose and use of humor helps to “lubricate the wheels of the genre” and enables the participants in the defense to proceed “in an informal atmosphere of solidarity and cooperation” (Swales, Research Genres 170). More recently, Sunny Hyon has examined the multi-functionality of communicative purposes in university retention-promotion-tenure (RPT) reports. Analyzing how report writers use playfulness and inventiveness in RPT reports, Hyon suggests that while not overturning the reports’ official communicative purposes, “the inventiveness . . . may add unofficial purposes to these reports” (“Convention and Inventiveness in an Occluded Academic Genre” 178). Likewise, Ken Hyland has recently analyzed the strategies that academic writers use in different academic communities to construct themselves and their readers. Focusing on “stance” and “engagement,” Hyland examines how writers insert their personality into their texts through the use of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers, and how they construct their readers through the use of questions, reader pronouns, and directives (Hyland, “Stance and Engagement”). Hyland’s research demonstrates that, within the conventions of disciplinary discourses, individual writers can “manipulate the options available to them for creative and rhetorical purposes of their own” (Johns et al., “Crossing the Boundaries” 238).
In recognizing the complexity of communicative purpose and broadening the range of analysis to include “sets of communicative purposes,” recent ESP approaches to genre study acknowledge the dynamic, interactive nature of genres. In addition to analyzing occluded genres that function behind the scenes of more dominant genres, ESP genre researchers have begun also to attend to what Swales calls “genre chains,” whereby “one genre is a necessary antecedent for another” (Swales, Research Genres 18). Attending to networks of genres reveals that genre competence involves knowledge not only of individual genres, but also of how genres interact with one another in complex ways to achieve dynamic purposes. Bronia P.C. So has explored the implications of this complex set of relations for ESP genre pedagogy, concluding that: “To enable students to cope with a wide range of genres in today’s world, it is important to help them acquire not only the knowledge of the rhetorical context, audience, generic conventions, as well as overlaps and distinctions, but more importantly also the knowledge and understanding of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in genre writing” (77).
To examine genre intertextuality, some ESP researchers have emphasized ethnographic approaches to genre study. Ann Johns, for example, has promoted the idea of students as both genre researchers and genre theorists to help bridge the gap between what genre researchers know about genres (as complex, dynamic entities) and what student are often taught about genres (as static, fixed forms) in literacy classrooms (Johns, “Destabilizing and Enriching” 237-40; see also Johns, “Teaching Classroom and Authentic Genres”). In Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies, Johns invites students to become ethnographers of the academic contexts in which they are learning to write, including the values and expectations underlying the genres they are asked to write and what
