Situation 8: Your new classmate is having a problem deciding which course to take next year—industrial computers or multimedia—because both of
2. Summary of Content
The book consists of five parts and covers twenty four papers selected on different topics. Part One is called Advances in Genre Theories and consists of four papers which cover the fundamental issues on how genre theories are connected to each other or how new perspectives can replace them. The first chapter written by John M. Swales is Worlds of Genre-Metaphors of Genre. It explores the complexity of genre and provides lots of examples. Swales classifies four main problems: (a) the misleading nature of the titles of the genre, (b) balancing the past and the future, (c) distinguishing oneself such as going beyond the CV, and (d) offering a believable long-term commitment for PhD programme. He also compares how different metaphors present
different aspects of genre. Metaphors not only help us understand the genre itself, but also help us see its institutional ranking in the world. Through examples, he shows that the genre of the statement of purpose (SOP)/personal statement is clearer for the users, but this does not apply to art history monograph. The paper concludes that the role of genre is mediation between social situations and the texts. It is a response to the needs of situations, and finding ir-/regularities or explaining them is the job of the genre analysts.
The second paper titled From Speech Genres to Mediated Multimodal Genre Systems: Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and the Question of Writing is written by Paul Prior, directs the attention of the readers to the multimodality of genre interactions. It elaborates on the textual content and situations of text production, use, and attributing meaning. Prior focuses on four key issues:
(a) the nature of the Bakhtinian notion of utterance, (b) the problem of the text, (c) the question of writing, and (d) the relationship of inner to outer semiotics as multimodality. His issues derive from empirical and theoretical attention to writing. He distinguishes the work of Voloshinov from that of Bakhtin.
The third chapter To Describe Genres: Problems and Strategies written collaboratively by Antonia Coutinho and Florencia Miranda first poses two questions: (a) in what measure the genres can be described? and (b) is there any convergence in the work about genres and texts? The authors raise the questions of attributing genre by observing the case of genres that are presented within a fictionalizing frame of another genre and suggest some strategies for dealing with the problems by changing the interpretation and position towards the original genre while the important aspects of its original identity is still kept untouched.
The last chapter of part one Relevance and Genre: Theoretical and Conceptual Interfaces is written by Fábio José Rauen. The paper evaluates relevance theory to examine how genre is shaped by relevance considerations within situations. The author discusses a possible application of the genre concept to a text comprehension theory using relevance approach proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995) and Swales (1990, 1998). He draws how genre focuses on users’ relevance expectations. He demonstrates how contextual cognitive processes intervene and concludes that a collaborative approach exist between relevance relations and generic structures in which relevance relations guide the generic structures and generic structures, guide relevance relations. This collaboration leads to a more effective association between the writer and the reader.
The second part of the book is Genre and the Professions which focuses on how we understand our roles in profession-centered world and how genres
help different professions. The first two papers of this part review the genre in the law. Chapter Five of the book titled Accusation and Defense: the Ideational Metafunction of Language in the Genre Closing Argument written by Cristiane Fuzer and Nina Célia Barros examines closing arguments in closing trials. The authors claim that they intend to search for “a better understanding of the functioning of legal practices and the ways social actors involved in criminal proceedings” (p.78). They believe that the analysis of the soci-semantic and roles in the closing argument show how the social actors in trial proceedings are embodied in a specific genre. In this particular genre (closing argument), the defendant has no voice and his legal practitioners, either the defense attorney or prosecutor present their comments in the form of facts or truths. At the same time, the defendant is kept at the narrative center, while the legal experts are in the background because they act just in the name of their institutions not by themselves.
In Chapter Six, The Sociohistorical Constitution of the Genre Legal Booklet: A Critical Approach, Leonardo Pinheiro Mozdzenski traces the introduction of laws in Brazil and investigates the sociohistorical path of the Brazilian layman’s law guide, from its appearance to current status. The author focuses on main social, religious and historical events which were the origins of the genres that formed the first legal booklets and influenced the development of the present law guides accessible to all citizens. The chapter explains that
“today’s legal booklets result from the formal and ideological confluence and influence of three other genres: religious/school primers, political leaflets, and “Vargist” educational booklets” (p. 129). Referring to Mozdzenski (2006), the author concludes that modern law booklets use different strategies borrowed from their antecedent genres, and employ some linguistic tools such as visual aids, comic book stories, drawings and caricatures, special print formatting, graphics, colorful layout, etc.
In Chapter Seven, Uptake and the Biomedical Subject Kimberly Emmons focuses on the impact of mental health professions. She studies how people take up professional discourses of mental health to form their subjectivities when they are depressed and concludes that people experiencing mild-moderate symptoms of depression uptake subjectivities in their talks.
Chapter Eight is titled Stories of Becoming: A Study of Novice Engineers Learning Genres of their Profession. In this chapter, Natashas Artemeva explores the processes of genre learning and the role of the formal classroom instruction. She designs a qualitative, longitudinal study in the form of four Individual Case Synopses of novice engineers who had taken some courses.
She observes them for some years to follow their trajectories in learning genres of engineering. Her study provides “illustrations of the integrated theoretical framework’s applications to the study of genre learning by novice
professionals” (p. 159). The chapter concludes that some ingredients of genre knowledge can be taught in a classroom context, but to make it active and successful, one needs to complete it by other genre knowledge ingredients accumulated elsewhere.
The final chapter of the second part titled The Dissertation as Multi-Genre:
Many Readers, Many Readings is written by Anthony Paré, Doreen Starke-Meyerring, and Lynn McAlpine. The chapter starts with the authors’ comment that it is ironic to say that the genre of dissertation is “under-theorized, under-studied, and under-taught” (p. 179), because many academics have already completed a dissertation but referring to Kamler and Thomson (2006), they claim that there is relative shortage of well-theorized materials about dissertations. The authors collected data through a longitudinal study from different sources such as interviews with PhD candidates, supervisors, administrators, recorded supervisory sessions, student logs, etc. They sought to determine the complex factors influencing the success and failure of PhD candidates in writing their dissertations. The chapter describes a variety of readers such as the implicated reader, the disciplinary reader, the evoked reader, and the implied reader; and variety of readings which lie on a continuum from the general to the highly specific, and from the implicit to the explicit readings. The chapter ends with the conclusion that “as a multi-genre, the dissertation thus becomes a rich and rhetorically challenging space for supervisors and students to enact the complexity of a widely distributed disciplinary and academic life in one text” (p. 191).
Part Three on Genre and Media considers how our view of the world is shaped by journalistic genres in the public sphere. The first three papers in this part examine the novelty of newspaper genres, and the last one explores how public subjectivities are influenced by newspaper stories. Chapter Ten of the book The Distinction between News and Reportage in the Brazilian Journalistic Context: A Matter of Degree written by Adair Bonini looks at Brazilian newspapers. The paper is based on the new rhetoric approach to genre studies and considers genre as a social action. It defines the concepts of news and reportage, evaluates “news as a genre” as well as “reportage as a genre”.
It takes examples of both genres from a specific journalistic culture (a Brazilian newspaper), but hopes to find reflections on other journalistic contexts. The author introduces news to reportage continuum and claims that
“it is not an easy task to teach and learn the reading and writing practices assigned to both of them” (p. 220).
Chapter Eleven The Organization and Functions of the Press Dossier: The Case of Media Discourse on the Environment in Portugal written by Rui Ramos is a discourse analysis study aiming to examine and elaborate the macro-textual organization of a dossier in the Portuguese press on the theme of climate
change. Ramos defines dossier as “a common designation in the journalistic sphere and in the context of linguistic analysis of press discourse” (p. 223). He pinpoints three separate cases in the structure of the media event: (a) the reported event, (b) the commentary of the event, and (c) the ensuing event and claims that the dossier’s organization is circular in every aspect that is from the predominately informative text, to the explicative or opinion text.
Helen Caple in Chapter Twelve Multi-semiotic Communication in an Australian Broadsheet: A New News Story Genre introduces a new genre of news stories in Australian newspaper (Sydney Morning Herald “SMH”) which is a reflection to the graphic culture adopted by internet culture. It is the use of a dominant news photograph with a heading and only a short caption. She terms this new genre as the “image-nuclear news story” (Caple, 2008).
Image-nuclear news stories “reflect the ideological position of the news organization towards the stories and how they are valued as news” (p. 244).
She claims that this genre is independent and does not refer to other news stories in the newspaper. Throughout this chapter, she outlines the origin of this news story genre and explores how this genre has motivated public to read SMH. Referring to Fairfax Media (2007), she claims that SMH has attracted a certain kind of readers and enjoys increasing circulation in the last three years.
This part ends with Narrative and Identity Formation: An Analysis of Media Personal Accounts from Patients of Cosmetic Plastic Surgery written by Débora de Carvalho Figueiredo. In this chapter, the author investigates how the identities of three women, especially in what concerns their body design, are understood in the genre “media personal account”, in two Brazilian glossy female magazines. Figueiredo claims that personal account sections are very common in women’s magazines and have a fixed format. This genre is investigated because it promotes hegemonic models of female identity in women’s magazines. The organization of this genre shows that mechanisms of operation and control of media information trains women to know what they should say or omit when they talk about their bodies and identities. This genre also manipulates what is socially accepted and how women should define and explain themselves. The chapter concludes that “certain genres of the media (such as media personal accounts) perform the social action of creating idealized identities that interpellate and imbricate individuals by and into gendered narratives” (p. 256). It analyzes how identities are shaped through stories of plastic surgery experiences in glossy female magazines.
Part Four Genre in Teaching and Learning consists of six chapters which refer to educational implications and applications of genre theory and research. In Genre and Cognitive Development: Beyond Writing to Learn Charles Bazerman examines how the writing of specific genres might be instrumental in
cognitive development. He believes that writing can help us move to a new stage of thinking because the emergence of different written genres within different activities have made the knowledge, thought, cognition, and reasoning in the world. Writing can help us organize our thoughts to employ our knowledge in the world. Bazerman claims that genres not only identify a problem for the writer but also provide the solution and tools to overcome the problem. Getting familiar with genres help us get the problem and solution. “The greater the challenge of the solution, the greater the possibilities of cognitive growth” (p. 291).
In Chapter Fifteen, Bakhtin Circle’s Speech Genres Theory: Tools for a Transdisciplinary Analysis of Utterances in Didactic Practices Roxane Helena Rodrigues Rojo considers how genre theory can be turned toward understanding classroom discourse. She suggests an interdisciplinary approach to a dialogic understanding of classroom and justifies it and believes that understanding the ideological echoes in didactic utterances can reduce “suffering deprivation”, and makequality of life better at school. She emphasizes that the analysis of school dialog can increase the Bakhtinian approach of dialog as genre and claims that her selected theory can keep the dialog with the constructs of other disciplines, and also produce its own knowledge.
In Chapter Sixteen, titled The Role of Context in Academic Text Production and Writing Pedagogy, Desirée Motta-Roth describes the design of a course in academic writing for graduate students. She focuses on the reciprocal relationship between text and context, the way context can be recreated by analysis of text and the other way around. She suggests that in the academic context, the challenges in teaching writing are many for novice writers. The paper focuses on writing activities that aim at raising students’ awareness about the connections between contextual features and their linguistic realizations. Raising students’ awareness on how the language system functions and educating novice writers about the uses of language can help them develop writing abilities, choose appropriate systems, and identify the connections between text and their surrounding circumstances. The paper concludes that there are three challenges in academic writing teaching:
“novice writers need to understand what genre is and how it functions, teachers have to effectively teach someone how to engage in the genres that constitute academic life, and novice writers must take part in the discourse of science” (p.334).
In Teaching Critical Genre Awareness Amy Devitt, similar to Motta-Roth, describes the theoretical rationale of a pedagogy aimed at increasing students’ critical awareness of genre. She argues that “rhetorical awareness can lead to critical awareness and to more deliberate action” (p.337). The
chapter elaborates on the limitations of explicitly teaching specific genres, and suggests a proposal for teaching genre awareness in which students are helped to become more aware of the influence of genres on their communication and thinking. They receive a “series of assignments that help them analyze, write, critique, and change or rewrite genres” (p.348). She concludes that the result of raising awareness is “writers with expanded genre repertoires” (p. 349).
Chapter Eighteen, Curricular Proposal of Santa Catarina State: Assessing the Route, Opening Paths written by Maria Marta Furlanetto elaborates on the difficult process of introducing teachers to an understanding of genre so that they can better use a genre-based curriculum. The paper summarizes relevant theoretical articulations for dealing with language practices related to genres at the school environment by a synthesis of the writer’s personal experience as a consultant for curricular proposal and proposes a general evaluation of the efforts made to implement the directives pointed out in the document, and presents some critical elements in its interpretation. The paper ends with some philosophical and theoretical aspects needed for researchers and practitioners who are interacting with the students.
In the final paper of Part Four titled Intertextual Analysis of Finnish EFL Textbooks: Genre Embedding as Recontextualization, Salla Lähdesmäki uses theories of genre and intertextuality to analyze how SL textbooks integrate other genres as part of learning activities. Through an illustrative example
“The Dating Disasters Text”, the author shows how EFL textbook can engage and motivate the readers by incorporating generic influences from the domain of youth culture and media.
Part Five Genre in Writing across the Curriculum considers how genre theory has been used to help students learn to communicate within specialized disciplines and professions, in the kinds of programs that have been called Writing across the Curriculum. The part has five chapters which provide comparisons of the way genre is being used in different educational settings.
Chapter Twenty Exploring Notions of Genre in Academic Literacies and Writing across the Curriculum: Approaches across Countries and Contexts is collaboratively written by David R. Russell, Mary Lea, Jan Parker, Brian Street, and Tiane Donahue. The chapter compares British Academic Literacies (ACLITS) with US Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to map out come elements of each tradition in relation to the other and to genre. The authors claim that although ACLITS and WAC treat genre in social and cultural terms, there are fundamental differences in approaches to and development of genre theory, research, and pedagogy, and although both traditions are interested in the transition from secondary to higher education, comparisons are difficult, because ACLITS and WAC are doing different things. They claim that the US
WAC movement is larger and more diverse.
In next chapter, Genre and Disciplinary Work in French Didactics Research Tiane Donahue presents the French didactics approach to academic writing.
The author reviews some of the innovative paths taken by presenting one of the leading projects in France which studies students’ writing and learning practice in different fields at three universities and shows how perspectives about genre have evolved and play in the study of student writing across disciplines.
In Negotiating Genre: Lecturer’s Awareness in Genre across the Curriculum Project at the University Level Estela Inés Moyano presents a linguistically based initiative to increase faculty’s genre awareness of student assignments at an Argentinian University. Her negotiation genre guides the lecturers to define clearly genres that the students need to learn. Stages and phases of each genre are made explicitly to realize the meanings of texts, their functions, and relationships. Moyano believes that “genres are negotiated from the perspective of professional and academic activities in each field, the interpersonal relationships and the role language plays in the process of writing and learning” (p. 459). Raising lecturer’s awareness about the importance of genre to teach academic literacy helps the students improve their skills and manage better the concepts of their subjects.
In The Development of a Genre-Based Writing Course for Graduate Students in Two Fields Solange Aranha describes SL disciplinary-focused, genre-based writing in English courses for graduate students in Genetics and Dentistry which are planned to fit the students’ needs, motivation, and background knowledge to develop academic skills. According to Aranha, the main objective of these courses was to make the students aware of the linguistic constraints of academic writing in a FL.
The book ends with Giovanni Parodi’s paper titled Written Genres in University Studies: Evidence from an Academic Corpus of Spanish in Four Disciplines. The author presents a Spanish language corpus research project into genres used in disciplinary courses in a Chilean university. The paper is made of two parts: the first part presents theoretical background that frames the research, and the second part establishes the parameters of the constitution of the academic corpus, and undertakes a general description of the nine genres that have been identified in four academic disciplines from two scientific branches during the five-year university programs of the study.
The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus in the study reveals differences both in the number and variety of written genres identified. The study also shows that the texts employed as reading material in one field are not the same as in other fields.