of ESP genre analysis has remained on explicating genre conventions (schematic and lexico-grammatic) against the backdrop of the genre’s social context.13 So while both ESP and Rhetorical genre approaches recognize genres as relating texts and context, the point of emphasis and analytical/pedagogical trajectory of each approach has differed, so that, generally speaking, in ESP genre study, context has been used to understand texts and communicative purposes while in Rhetorical Genre Studies, texts have been used to study contexts and social actions—in particular, how texts mediate situated symbolic actions.
The difference in emphasis between communicative purpose and social action not only reflects different analytical trajectories between ESP and rhetorical genre approaches; it also underscores different pedagogical philosophies and goals. Rhetorical genre researchers, for example, tend to question whether explicit teaching of genre is enough, arguing instead for a more immersion- and ethnographic-based pedagogy in which students encounter, analyze, and practice writing genres in the contexts of their use. Such an approach, RGS researchers argue, allows students to get at some of the inter- and extra-textual knowledge that exceeds knowledge of genre conventions and that genre users must possess in order to perform genres effectively. Around the time of Swales’s Genre Analysis, Charles Bazerman was describing this rhetorical/sociological view when he suggested that writing instruction should go beyond “the formal trappings” of genres and instead help make students aware that “the more [they] understand the fundamental assumptions and aims of [their] community, the better able [they] will be . . . to evaluate whether the rhetorical habits [they] and [their] colleagues bring to the task are appropriate and effective” (Shaping 320, 323). As Mary Jo Reiff recently put it, “Making genre analysis the focal point of ethnographic inquiry . . . ties communicative actions to their contexts and can illustrate to students how patterns of linguistic and rhetorical behavior . . . are inextricably linked to patterns of social behavior” (Johns et al, 243).
The debate between explicit and more sociological approaches to genre teaching is not absolute, of course, and many genre scholars and teachers employ hybrid models that cross boundaries of the debate, as we will examine in the next two chapters and in Chapters 10 and 11. But as Diane Belcher explains, “for learners faced with linguistic and literacy barriers . . . ESP proponents contend that immersion is not enough” (171). Christine Tardy, while acknowledging genres’ complexity (as a “kind of nexus among the textual, social, and political dimensions of writing”), likewise advises that, given the non-native English speaking population most often targeted in ESP genre approaches, it is necessary to compartmentalize genres. As Tardy writes, “some of the advanced ESL writers I observed, for example, had difficulty analyzing genres from a linguistic and rhetorical perspective and then drawing links between these features and the rhetorical scene. They found little relevance in such analysis and at times saw the complexities of genre as too abstract to be of use. Perhaps at some stages and for some learners, more filtered or compartmentalized views of genre are also necessary” (Johns et al, 239).
This pedagogical debate and the set of theoretical questions that inform it bring us to the permeable yet dividing boundaries between not only ESP and rhetorical genre approaches, but between linguistic and rhetorical traditions in genre study. In Chapter 5, we will explore rhetorical genre theory, tracing its roots, current theories and approaches, and its analytical and pedagogical possibilities, and in Chapter 6, we will examine how these theories and approaches have informed the study and teaching of genre within Rhetorical Genre Studies.
5 Genre in Rhetorical and Sociological Traditions
At the end of Chapter 4, we began to draw some general distinctions between linguistic (particularly English for Specific Purposes) and rhetorical genre approaches, having to do with differences between their communicative and sociological emphases, and with the extent to which genres can and should be taught explicitly. Both linguistic and rhetorical approaches to genre—whether in the form of Systemic Functional Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, or Rhetorical Genre Studies—share a fundamental understanding of genre as inextricably tied to situation. As Aviva Freedman recently put it, “both insist on the limitations of traditional conceptions of genres which focused only on recurring textual features. Both stressed the need to recognize the social dimensions of genre. . . . Both approaches emphasize the addressee, the context, and the occasion” (“Interaction” 104). Yet while both linguistic and rhetorical genre approaches recognize genres as connecting texts and contexts, the point of emphasis and analytical/pedagogical trajectory of each approach has differed, as Freedman and others have noted (see especially Hyon, “Genre in Three Traditions”; also Hyland, “Genre-Based Pedagogies” and Paltridge, Genre and the Language Learning Classroom), and these differences have had significant implications for how each tradition recognizes the work that genres do, how genres can be studied, and the ways genres can be taught and acquired.
In the case of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), the differences in emphasis and trajectory can be traced to each field’s guiding definitions of genre and the traditions that inform them. Following John Swales, ESP genre approaches have generally defined genres as communicative events which help members of a discourse community achieve shared communicative purposes. As such, genres are forms of communicative action. Within RGS, and following Carolyn Miller, genres have been defined as forms of social action. The next chapter will explore in greater detail what it means to think of genres as forms of social action and its implications for the researching and teaching of genres within RGS. But first, in this chapter, we will compare RGS’s and ESP’s guiding definitions of genre in order to clarify their communicative and sociological emphases. Then we will situate RGS’s guiding definition of genre within the rhetorical, phenomenological, and sociological traditions from which it grew. We will conclude the chapter by describing recent genre scholarship in Brazil, which has synthesized the sociological, rhetorical, and linguistic traditions (while also drawing on French and Swiss genre pedagogic traditions) in ways that reveal the possible interconnections between these traditions.
Communicative and Sociological Orientations to Genre
Within ESP genre approaches, the aims of genre analysis have generally been to examine what a discourse community’s goals are and how genre features (structurally and lexico-grammatically) embody and help its members carry out their communicative goals. Thus, as generally understood in ESP genre research, it is communicative purpose (defined in relation to a discourse community’s shared goals) that both gives rise to and provides the rationale for a genre, and shapes its internal structure. It is communicative purpose that often serves as a starting point for ESP genre analyses, which then proceed toward an analysis of a genre’s rhetorical moves and steps, then to textual and linguistic features that carry out the moves and steps. Because ESP approaches have tended to define genres as forms of communicative action that help members of a discourse community carry out its work, the trajectory of inquiry has tended to go from context to text. That trajectory has been used to great effect by scholars and teachers to help, in particular, graduate-level, international, non-native speakers of English gain access to and participate more effectively within various academic contexts by explicating and teaching the genres that coordinate the work of these contexts. Significantly, such an internal, linguistic trajectory has tended to take the existence of a discourse community and its goals as a given—a starting point for the identification and analysis of genres.
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