own theories of genre in the context of a “remedial” EAP course, inviting students to reflect on the (often limited and limiting) theories of genre they bring with them and encouraging them “to broaden their concepts of genre and their genre repertoire” at the same time as they acquire new academic genres (244). This more auto-ethnographic approach enables students to become more “aware of the interaction between process, intertextuality, and products, and the variation among texts even within what is assumed to be a single pedagogical genre such as the research paper or five-paragraph essay” (246).
Brian Paltridge has recently described the use of ethnography in a writing course for second language graduate students at the University of Sydney, in which students interview their professors in order to find out why they want students to write in certain genres and what purposes these genres serve within the discipline. In so doing, students can deploy their “thicker” understanding of genres within their disciplinary setting in order to “negotiate the boundaries, values, and expectations of the disciplines in which they are writing” (Johns et al., “Crossing the Boundaries” 236). Such ethnographic approaches in ESP genre teaching signal a recognition among ESP genre researchers of the deeply social nature of genres, not only in the sense that genres are embedded in social contexts such as discourse communities, but also in the sense that genres help shape social contexts—a view of genre acknowledged by Ken Hyland when he writes: “It is through this recurrent use of conventional forms and communicative practices that individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done. Genres therefore not only embed social realities but also construct them” (Johns et al, “Crossing the Boundaries” 237). As Swales puts it is in his “textographic” study of a university building (1998), genres help connect “lifeways” and “textways” (Other Floors).11
Despite recent attempts to bring a more dynamic, complex understanding of genre into ESP classrooms, ESP genre approaches have been subject to critique by scholars who contend that such approaches are often subject to a pedagogy of accommodation, prescriptiveness, and genre competence rather than genre performance. To counterbalance these motivations, some ESP scholars have called for a more critical approach to genre study and teaching within ESP.
ESP and Critical Approaches to Genre
Sarah Benesch was one of the first EAP scholars to point out the ideological consequences of giving non-native English speaking students access to academic and professional discourse communities through explicit teaching of genre conventions (see Critical English and “ESL, Ideology, and the Politics of Pragmatism”).12 By ignoring the ideological implications of such a pedagogy of accommodation, Benesch argues, EAP teachers unwittingly reproduce the very academic cultures of power that exclude non-native speaking students in the first place. As such, “EAP’s accommodation to traditional academic practices” may actually “limit the participation of nonnative-speaking students in academic culture” (Benesch, “ESL, Ideology, and the Politics of Pragmatism” 713). Benesch has not been alone in questioning the implications of what Pennycook has called ESP’s “vulgar pragmatism.” As noted in Belcher, Peter Master has called on ESP to be more self-reflective about its role both in spreading global English and in helping language learners meet the needs of institutions and workplaces without questioning what and whose interests these needs represent (Master 724). Likewise, Alan Luke explains that a “a salient criticism of the ‘genre model’ is that its emphasis on the direct transmission of text types does not necessarily lead on to a critical appraisal of that disciplinary corpus, its field or its related institutions, but rather may lend itself to an uncritical reproduction of discipline” (314).
Such critiques do not reject an accomodationist approach entirely, but call instead for what Pennycook calls a “critical pragmatism,” one that still aims to provide non-native speakers of English with access to genres of power and opportunity but that does so more critically. The difference between Pennycook’s “vulgar” and “critical” pragmatism hinges on what ESP researchers and teachers mean by “explicit” analysis and teaching of genres. The kind of explicit analysis and teaching called for by critical pragmatism would go beyond explicating genre patterns and features to include an analysis of the ideologies, identities, and power relations embedded in and reproduced by these patterns and features. As Brian Paltridge explains, a critical perspective on genre “might explore the connections between discourse, language learning, language use, and the social and political contexts” while providing “students with the tools they need to succeed” (Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 121). Such an approach argues that effective participation within a discourse community requires more than just the ability to follow genre conventions as these relate to communicative purposes; it requires the ability to know why genres and purposes exist, whose interests they serve and whose they exclude, what they make possible and what they obscure, and so on. This more critical approach to genre, its proponents argue, shifts the focus from a pedagogy of cultural accommodation to what Pennycook calls a “pedagogy of cultural alternatives” (264), whereby students can potentially adapt genre conventions in order to represent alternative purposes and/or their own cultural perspectives.
Related to the critique of ESP’s pedagogy of accommodation has been a concern with ESP’s potentially prescriptive view of genre. Christine Casanave has warned, for example, that ESP genre-based approaches can privilege “a socially situated product perspective” (82), while Kay and Dudley-Evans observe that ESP approaches tend to focus on the teaching of “conventionalized lists of genre-identifying features” which can lead to “an imposed rather than a responsive notion of text” (311). The result can be characterized as a competence-based rather than performance-based acquisition of genres, in which students recognize and reproduce a genre’s constitutive conventions but are not as able to apply and adapt these genre conventions in response to actual communicative goals and situations.
In “Understanding Learners and Learning in ESP Genre-based Writing Instruction,” An Cheng takes up the distinction between “noticing” and “performing” genre (86). Cheng critiques ESP genre approaches for focusing too exclusively on examining target genres, and calls for more learner-and-context-focused research that “examines learners’ learning of genre and their development of generic/rhetorical consciousness” (77). The slighting of learners and learning in ESP genre approaches (a charge that could also be leveled against rhetorical genre approaches) raises important questions about what it means to use genres. To what extent does genre competence (knowledge of genre conventions) translate into genre performance? Is knowledge of genre conventions enough, or does genre performance require inter- and extra-textual knowledge that exceeds the ability of text-based genre analyses to deliver? If genre knowledge involves more than just knowledge of genre conventions, then what does genre knowledge entail? And how do genre researchers and teachers access and identify that knowledge? Questions such as these push at the disciplinary edges of ESP genre approaches, bringing us to the boundaries and debates between ESP and Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) approaches.
The way that RGS scholars have taken up the above questions reveals important differences between ESP and rhetorical genre approaches, having to do with the sociological nature of genres and the extent to which genres can and should be taught explicitly. While both ESP and rhetorical genre scholars acknowledge the dynamic relationship between texts and contexts, and while both recognize genres as situated rhetorical and linguistic actions, RGS has tended to understand genres not only as situated within contexts such as discourse communities, but also as constitutive of contexts—as symbolic worlds readers and writers co-construct and inhabit. That is, for RGS, context provides more than valuable background knowledge regarding communicative purpose(s), discourse community members, genre nomenclature, or even genre chains and occluded genres—significant as these are. Generally speaking, then, while ESP genre scholars have tended to understand genres as communicative tools situated within social contexts, rhetorical genre scholars have tended to understand genres as sociological concepts embodying textual and social ways of knowing, being, and interacting in particular contexts.
Even when more recent ESP genre research has acknowledged the sociological nature of genres, such as when Ken Hyland, cited
