Genre in the Classroom

Multiple Perspectives

Ann M. Johns, Ann M. Johns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135675370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For the first time, the major theoretical and pedagogical approaches to genre and related issues of social construction are presented in a single volume, providing an overview of the state of the art for practitioners in applied linguistics, ESL/EFL pedagogies, rhetoric, and composition studies around the world. Unlike volumes that present one theoretical stance, this book attempts to give equal time to all theoretical and pedagogical camps. Included are chapters by authors from the Sydney School, the New Rhetoric, and English for Specific Purposes, as well as contributions from other practitioners who pose questions that cross theoretical lines. Genre in the Classroom:
*includes all of the major theoretical views of genre that influence pedagogical practice;
*takes an international approach, drawing from all parts of the world in which genre theory has been applied in the classroom--Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, the Middle East, the United States;
*features contributors who are all both theorists and classroom practitioners, lending credibility and authenticity to the arguments;
*combines theory and practice in every chapter, showing how particular theoretical views influence classroom practice;
*grounds pedagogical practices in their own regional and theoretical histories;
*openly discusses problems and questions that genre theory raises and presents some of the solutions suggested; and
*offers a concluding chapter that argues for two macro-genres, and with responses to this argument by noted genre theorists from three theoretical camps.

Part I
The Sydney School

1
“Something to Shoot For”: A Systemic Functional Approach to Teaching Genre in Secondary School Science

Mary Macken-Horarik
University of Canberra, Australia

It has become something of a truism in conversations among “Sydney School” linguists that students at risk of school failure fare better within a visible curriculum. In this view, such students need explicit induction into the genres of power if they are to participate in mainstream textual and social processes within and beyond the school. But what does “explicit induction” mean in pedagogic terms, and what kinds of metalinguistic resources are going to serve learners well in this process? Many claims and counter-claims have been made about the role of genre in both textual and social processes (see, for example, Callaghan & Rothery, 1988; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Lee, 1997; Luke, 1996; Martin, 1993a; Reid, 1987). This chapter is one contribution to the ongoing dialogue between theorists of the Sydney School and beyond.¹ It focuses on the role of a systemic functional metalanguage in the process of initiating students into subject-specific literacies rather than with social processes more broadly.² More particularly, it explores the role of genre and register in one teacher’s mediation of the demands and possibilities of scientific literacy.

The classroom work on which this chapter is based was itself part of a larger project associated with the Disadvantaged Schools Program (hereafter, DSP)

situated in Erskineville, Sydney. There have been two important school literacy projects coordinated by the DSP. The first was the Language and Social Power Project, which focused on the application of genre-based approaches to teaching literacy in primary and secondary schools (see Callaghan, Knapp, & Noble, 1993; Callaghan & Rothery, 1988, for fuller accounts of this project). The second was the Write it Right Project, which extended the work of the earlier project to incorporate register-sensitive accounts of secondary school literacy in its interface with workplace literacies (see Christie & Martin, 1997, for a full review of this research). The current chapter is based on case-study material, which emerged primarily during the first project.

Most of the junior secondary-school teachers involved in DSP in-services wanted access to resources and assistance that would help them to integrate literacy and learning in different subjects with perceivable pay-offs for both subject-area learning and literacy. It was against this background that Margaret Watts and I began to work cooperatively on classroom-based research in 1990. Margaret was one of the DSP science teachers who had become interested in the notion of genre when she saw how positively it impacted on students struggling with the literacy demands of science. In her early applications of the model, Margaret introduced her students to the full range of scientific genres such as procedures, recounts, explanations, reports, and expositions. Her students analyzed the generic structure of these written genres and spent time producing texts similar to her prototypes. All had some degree of success with each genre. But, as Margaret later realized, some genres (like explanations), which are crucial to the construction of scientific knowledge, are more difficult to teach than others (like procedures).

This chapter takes up the point at which Margaret began work on explanation with a Year 10 class in a new school, drawing on her earlier experiences and pushing the model in the direction of greater usefulness to secondary-school teachers. The contextual framework reviewed here is based solidly on her classroom work (as well as that of others in DSP schools). It shows how the systemic functional metalanguage (related to the tools of genre and register) can be used in planning for, reflecting on, and assessing student literacy across the curriculum.

Margaret claimed that the metalanguage drawn from systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) gave her “something to shoot for” when teaching scientific literacy. Her words form the title of this chapter because I believe they capture the attraction that this metalanguage and its associated pedagogy have for many teachers. To anticipate my argument a little, the metalanguage gives teachers “something to shoot for” because it enables them to characterize goals for learning in semiotic terms—to turn them into meanings. Using the context-text framework presented in the next section (see especially Table 1.2), Margaret formulated learning goals in terms of the demands of particular genres and register values. In addition to this, she shared aspects of the metalanguage (especially genre) with her students as well as using it herself (especially register) to reflect on her students’ difficulties and achievements. She found that the texts her students produced yielded valuable evidence about what they had learned and the kinds of assistance they still needed—especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds. As will be seen, she was able to turn this framework to rhetorical ends.

The chapter is divided into two halves. In the first half, I outline those aspects of SFL that secondary teachers have drawn on in their teaching, setting out the contextual framework and dealing with the pedagogy adopted by Margaret and other DSP teachers. In the second half of the chapter, I show how Margaret applied this model in a unit of work on reproduction technologies with her class of 15- and 16-year-olds (in New South Wales, Year 10 is the final year of junior secondary high school). My reflections attempt to mediate the significance of her work for development of the contextual framework (initially reported on in Macken & Rothery, 1991).

A CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING LITERACY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

A viable contextual framework for teaching literacy across the curriculum has to face two ways: toward the specificities of learning in particular subject areas, and toward the commonalities of higher order academic learning more generally. This is important because in the later years of secondary schooling, students learn through language, and the texts they encounter are increasingly abstract, technical, and metaphorical. Furthermore, the framework must enable teachers to move in mutually predictable ways between the learning contexts they set up for students and the kinds of texts they encounter there.

The following contextual framework assumes that there is a principled and mutually determining relationship between language use and its social environment. It was Michael Halliday who first proposed a systematic connection between social context and text meanings. In the late 1970s, he observed that the internal organization of language itself corresponded to the external organization of social context:

The context of situation, the context in which the text unfolds, is encapsulated in the text, not in a kind of piecemeal fashion, not at the other extreme in any mechanical way, but through a systematic relationship between the social environment on the one hand, and the functional organization of language on the other. If we treat both text and context as semiotic phenomena, as modes of meaning, so to speak, we can get from one to the other in a revealing way. (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, pp. 11–12)

Halliday represents the immediate social environment in terms of context of situation. This tripartite construct comprises three crucial variables: field, referring to the nature of the social action taking place; tenor, referring to the roles taken up by interactants in the interaction; and mode, referring primarily to the channel of communication—whether spoken or written or some combination of the two (Halliday, 1985, p. 12). Taken together, these three contextual variables determine the register of a text (the patterns of meanings associated with the context). Thus, contextual variation produces register variation. The twin notions of context of situation and register are useful because they show how context “gets into” text and how context itself is “recovered from” a text.

In later educational applications of SFL, linguists such as Jim Martin, Joan Rothery, and others added another layer to context of situation. They built on the notion of genre as it is used in literary or film criticism to include all “staged, goal-oriented, social processes” (Martin, 1984). They argued that scientific reports, procedures, service encounters, and government submissions are just as much genres as the more familiar examples of narrative fiction or film. In this extension of the functional language model, the notion of genre is “tuned into” the social purpose of a text and captures its distinctive global (or schematic) structure. The notion of register, on the other hand, relates to the context of situation in which a text is produced (and heard or read) and accounts for the text’s distinctive patterns of meaning (see Table 1.3 for a composite view).

The first educational implementations of the model in the early to mid-1980s raised teachers’ consciousness about the category of genre and introduced them to a wider range of text types than was currently available (Martin, 1984). In the educational climate of this time, it is arguable that teachers would have tolerated only a very simple metalanguage. The growth model of literacy and associated regimes such as process writing exercised a hegemony in the literacy curriculum in those days, and teachers were cautioned to “bite their tongues” rather than tell students anything about what or how to write (Rothery, 1989; Christie in Christie, 1990; Gilbert, 1990, for extended discussion of these issues). Early curriculum materials foregrounded only simple structural differences between genres and provided teachers with essential information about the structural elements (sche-matic stages) of key written genres, their social purposes, and social location. The material reproduced in Table 1.1 was developed by Joan Rothery and me for teacher in-services in DSP schools during the late 1980s. It is representative of the kind of genre metalanguage teachers worked with at that time in the classroom for a range of genres across the pri...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Genre in the Classroom
• Part I The Sydney School
• Part II Related Approaches
• Part III English for Specific Purposes
• Part IV Bridging Text and Context
• Part V The New Rhetoric
• Part VI Pedagogical Quandaries
• Part VII Conclusion and Responses
• CONTRIBUTORS
• REFERENCES
• Subject Index
• Author Index