Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes

Sunny Hyon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317644323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Genre analysis has become a key approach within the field of English for Specific Purposes and helps students understand particular language use patterns in target contexts.

Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes provides an overview of how genre has been conceptualized and applied in ESP, as well as the features that distinguish ESP genre research and teaching from those of other genre schools. The macro and micro aspects of ESP genre-based pedagogy are also analysed and include: different possibilities for planning and designing an ESP genre-based course; the concrete, micro aspects of materials creation; and how genres can be learned through play.

Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes is essential reading for students and pre-service teachers who are studying Genre, English for Specific Purposes or language teaching methodologies.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introducing genre in English for Specific Purposes

It does not take long to realize that genre is a central concept in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). As of this writing, a keyword search on genre in two of the field’s leading journals, English for Specific Purposes and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, generates 653 and 426 article hits, respectively. Genre is also referred to in 24 of the 28 chapters in the recent Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013); and multiple other ESP book titles reflect the field’s fascination with genre: Genre and the Language Learning Classroom (Paltridge, 2001), Research Genres (Swales, 2004), Genre and Second Language Writing (Hyland, 2004b), Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View (Bhatia, 2014), Academic Writing and Genre (Bruce, 2010), Building Genre Knowledge (Tardy, 2009), and Genres across the Disciplines (Nesi & Gardner, 2012), among others. What is it about genre that is so beguiling to ESP? I will return to this question in a bit, but first let’s consider what a genre is.

What is a genre?

In simple terms, a genre is a type of spoken or written text. We recognize it as a type, or category, because the various instances of it share similarities in purpose, content, form, and/or context. Wedding invitations, for example, comprise such a category, or genre. They occur in the same context—a couple is getting married—and they share a common function: to ask people to the wedding. They are also characterized by certain linguistic tendencies, including formal, elevated syntax and word choice, as illustrated in the invitation below.

Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Peter Hill

request the honor of your presence

at the marriage of their daughter

Miss Sandra Evelyn Hill

to

Mr. Jonathan Stephen Richards

Saturday, the seventh of May

Two thousand and one

At three o’clock in the afternoon

Ashland Methodist Church

869 South Canyon Road

Ashland, Montana

It is also important to point out that although genres such as wedding invitations (and others) are typically recognized by their recurring elements, they may also encompass variation among their textual members. Johns (1997), for example, discovered that wedding invitations range significantly in content and design according to “social forces” in their contexts of use (p. 41). These texts may also serve varied purposes beyond asking people to the wedding, such as directing guests on where to buy gifts or expressing the marrying couple’s personalities and values. Indeed, a highly innovative invitation that Tardy (2016) received illustrates the flexibility possible within this genre. Among its other inventive features, the invitation had the question “Where Have Pat and Yoongju Gone?” on its front panel, and then opened up to a “visual puzzle” where the bride and groom were “hidden in a mélange of cartoon characters, animals and city structures” (pp. 14–15).

To sum up then, a genre can be thought of as a category of texts characterized by similarities as well as—to some extent—differences across its members. The degree of internal difference and creativity particular genres allow is a point taken up further in Chapter 7.

Why genre in ESP?

Genres, their typified features, and their internal variability have proven of great interest to ESP researchers. Why is that so? One reason is that genres are related to ESP’s core mission of preparing students to use English in their target contexts—that is, the situations in which they hope to study, work, and/or live. All of these target contexts inevitably involve genres, whether they be research proposals in a sociology course, nursing care plans in a hospital, business meetings in a telecommunications company, or safety manuals in a factory. As such, it makes sense that ESP as a field is interested in researching students’ target genres and developing effective ways to teach students how to understand and use them. Genre may also be popular in ESP because of its nice “size” for language teaching (Paltridge, 2001, p. 4). A specific genre—for instance, a book review—lends a coherent, meaningful focus to a curricular unit, more so than might, say, a broad concept like textual organization. But such genre-focused units are still ‘large’ enough to encompass attention to elements like organization, vocabulary, grammar, audience, and purpose. And perhaps even more importantly, a genre unit allows students to see how these elements interact with each other in a specific genre. Finally, genre units also have relevance appeal in ESP courses because they are categories that students see themselves as needing to understand and use.

This book explores ESP’s interest in and approaches to thinking about genres and genre-based teaching. The rest of this chapter offers some historical context for this interest, beginning with early ESP work on scientific English and, subsequently, John Swales’ groundbreaking analysis of the research article genre. The chapter also considers ESP’s connections to and distinctiveness from the work of two other major genre traditions, Rhetorical Genre Studies and the Sydney School of genre studies. The rest of the chapters in the book then offer you opportunities to explore and apply key elements of ESP genre approaches. You will learn how to analyze genre moves and lexicogrammatical features of genres, as well as how to investigate genre contexts and purposes. In addition, you will explore ways that genres can be learned and taught within ESP contexts.

Throughout the book I will refer to both ESP ‘genre analysis’ and ESP ‘genre-based teaching’. Genre analysis includes investigations of genres and their contexts. Genre-based teaching, on the other hand, involves course designs, lessons, and activities that help students learn genres in their present or future target contexts. Genre analysis and teaching have often worked hand in hand. For example, ESP researchers have studied the organizational structures of scientific research papers, and their findings have then been applied to activities that teach students about these structures. In addition, teachers wishing to develop materials on a particular genre may conduct research on that genre or on how students learn it. Thus, ESP researchers and ESP teachers (or ‘practitioners’) are often the same people.

Early genre work

Pre-genre studies in English for Science and Technology

To understand ESP’s work on genre, it is helpful to appreciate what came before it in the first two decades of ESP. During this ‘pre-genre’ period of the 1960s–1970s, ESP focused mainly on researching and teaching scientific English, also known as English for Science and Technology (EST). As Hutchinson and Waters (1987) put it, “for a time ESP and EST were regarded as almost synonymous” (p. 7). Similarly, Swales (1985a), in chronicling early landmark EST research and teaching developments, noted that “With one or two exceptions … English for Science and Technology has always set and continues to set the trend in theoretical discussion, in ways of analyzing language, and in the variety of actual teaching materials” (p. x). Since then, other branches of ESP have become influential, yet EST at the time was certainly a central site of new approaches to language research and teaching that later led to genre-based research and teaching. The reasons for this strong EST-focus included the growth of English as an international language of scientific research as well as technological industries, and the related increasing demand for English instruction of international university students pursuing technological fields. Although EST remains an important area of genre work in ESP today, it now is often subsumed within a larger ESP branch concerned with academic English (including scientific English) known as English for Academic Purposes (EAP).

Although EST research of the 1960s was not focused on specific genres per se, it did attend to scientific texts in a general way, with particular attention to their vocabulary and syntactic patterns. The rationale behind this work was that if you could identify the word- and sentence-level features of scientific English, you could teach them to students, who would then be better able to read the English-language textbooks required of their science courses (Swales, 1985a). An important EST investigation along these lines was Barber’s 1962 article “Some measurable characteristics of modern scientific prose.” Acknowledging the many non-native English-speaking students “who rely wholly or largely on books published in Britain or the United States” (p. 21), Barber set out to identify frequently occurring language patterns in technical texts. Among other things, Barber found that scientific writing contained a high rate of present simple active and present simple passive constructions, as well as a notable number of non-finite verbs, including -ing forms, past participles, and infinitives. In terms of looking forward to later genre work, Barber’s focus on counting syntactic patterns was a precursor to corpus linguistics studies of salient genre features, discussed further in Chapter 3.

The teaching materials that grew out of Barber’s and other early EST investigations centered, not surprisingly, on sentence-level grammar and vocabulary. The methods reflected in these materials were also what we would now call traditional: Students were explained grammatical rules and then applied those rules in pattern-practice exercises. The segment below on “Infinitive of Result” taken from Herbert’s (1965) EST textbook, The Structure of Technical English, illustrates the kind of approach used.

Infinitive of Result

This is a peculiar construction of only limited use. The to + infinitive is used to indicate the result of the action previously stated, and is used with only a few verbs, of which the commonest are form and produce.

‘The wires are bound together to form a single strand.’

The idea here is one of result rather than purpose: ‘… with the result that a single strand is formed’.

Exercise

Link these statements in the same way

1 The anions unite with the copper of the plate. New copper sulphate is produced.

2 Hydrogen and oxygen combine chemically. They form the molecule H₂O.

3 The unstable isotopes undergo radioactive decay. Other isotopes are formed as a result.

(Excerpt from Herbert, 1965, pp. 189–190; some changes to format)

Although such exercises may seem old-fashioned, they are sometimes still incorporated in current genre-based curricula that, for example, ask students to imitate a sentence pattern (e.g., passive voice) common to a particular genre (e.g., scientific articles).

Contemporary ESP genre-based teaching materials also reflect other methodologies that have roots in early EST work. Beginning in the early 1970s, for example, EST text analysis and teaching applications shifted to describing why and in what contexts English grammatical patterns were used. Some of the scholars working within this more ‘rhetorical’ focus were from U.S. universities in the Northwest and came to be referred to as the “Washington School” of ESP (Johns, 2013). Among this group, Lackstrom, Selinker, and Trimble (1972) wrote a seminal article in English Teaching Forum, in which they argued that grammatical elements, such as verb tense, could only be understood in the context of the surrounding text. Such “rhetorical considerations,” they said, “include judgments concerning the order of the presentation of information, within the paragraph and within the total piece of which the paragraph is a part” (p. 4). This attention to the why and when of scientific grammar was a prelude to later focuses in genre scholarship on how a genre’s “communicative purposes” shape its formal features (Swales, 1990, p. 58)

With this move to thinking rhetorically about texts, EST work of the 1970s began to focus on language patterns beyond the sentence level, such as paragraph structures—laying a foundation for later research on organization of whole genres. Swales’ 1971 EST textbook, Writing Scientific English, for example, attended in part to the sequencing of sentences within scientific descriptions, for which he offered the following advice:

a Always begin with a general statement (often of a defining nature).

b Follow complicated general statements with examples.

c Explain the meaning of certain technical expressions. Here is a simple example:

Liquids possess fluidity. In other words, they do not take any definite shape of their own.

d Always move from the simple to the complex.

e Leave statements of use (if any) until towards the end.

f Do not contrast what you are describing with anything else until you have established clearly what you are describing in the first place.

g Remember that key-phrasing often makes a description easier to understand.

(Swales, 1971, p. 114)

In later reflection on this textbook, Swales (1985a) noted that his focus on “information structure of scientific paragraphs” was born out of his experience working with Arab engineering students. These students, he observed, “had been brought up in a different rhetorical tradition” and therefore would benefit from “some explicit work on how scientific writing in English was organized” (p. 38). With a similar orientation, Lackstrom, Selinker, and Trimble (1973) published a TESOL Quarterly article that asked the field to consider even larger patterns of textual organization. They proposed that the most important unit in scientific writing was not the sentence nor the physical paragraph (signaled by indentation and spacing) but rather the “conceptual paragraph,” a textual unit that developed a key point, or what they called a “core generalization,” potentially...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: ESP genre analysis
• PART III: ESP genre-based learning and teaching
• References
• Index