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Review: Genre Analysis: English in academic and research

settings by John Swales

Article  in  Journal of Pragmatics · March 1992

DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(92)90010-9

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286 Book notices

John Swales, Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 260 pp. (pb)

Reviewed by Peter Master*

Genre analysis, the long-awaited work by the current co-editor of the journal
English for Specific Purposes, is a carefully constructed and researched justifica-
* Correspondence address: P. Master, Department of Linguistics, California State University,
Fresno. CA 93740-0092, USA.
 Book notices 287

tion for the recognition of a new discipline within the field of discourse
analysis. The primary motivation for this effort sprang from Swales’ work
with nonnative speakers of English who were trying to produce acceptable
professional research articles. This has typically been the domain of English
for Adademic Purposes (EAP), one of the two primary divisions of English
for Specific Purposes (ESP), the other being English for Occupational Purposes
(EOP). In an earlier work, Episodes in ESP, Swales (1985) became the
unofficial historian of the young field of ESP by identifying fifteen seminal
articles in its evolution. That evolution reveals a movement from a narrow
concern with the linguistic description of scientific writing to a broad concern
for the specialized education that knowledge of a discipline implies. In many
ways, Genre analysis is the logical culmination of that evolution. The effort to
provide students with knowledge of their chosen fields or disciplinary cultures,
including “the belief systems, initiation ceremonies, rites of passage, value
judgments of excellence or otherwise, codes of practice, etc. of doctors,
research students, lawyers, navigators, geologists, and so on” (Swales 1985:
19) led to the realization that codes of practice imply knowledge of certain
genres, including research papers, letters of personal reference, grant propo-
sals, abstracts, conference presentations, and the like. Indeed, Swales claims
that genres are the properties of discourse communities.
Swales begins by tracing the origins of genre analysis in a number of
domains, including cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis
and notional/functional approaches to language learning, claiming with typi-
cal self-effacement that “whatever small measure of originality the approach
may possess probably lies as much in integrating the work of several different
traditions as in new thinking per se” (p. 13). He goes on to describe in
considerable detail the concepts that are key to his definition of genre
analysis: discourse community, genre, and task. These elements share the
single characteristic of communicative purpose.
Discourse community is defined as a group of individuals that (1) have a
broadly agreed set of common public goals, (2) have mechanisms of intercom-
munication among its members, (3) uses its participatory mechanisms to
provide feedback and information, (4) possesses one or more genres, (5) has
acquired a specific lexis, and (6) has a threshold level of members with a
suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. In this way, the
concept is differentiated from speech community and other social aggregates
such as shareholders, voters for a political party, restaurant clientele,
employees of a university, and academic classrooms.
Genre is defined as a class of communicative events which has (1) a shared
set of communicative purposes that are recognized by the parent discourse
community, (2) established constraints on contributions in terms of their
content, positioning and form and (3) nomenclature for genres that is deter-
mined by the discourse community. In this way, a genre is differentiated from
 what he calls ‘pre-genres’ such as conversation and narration or ‘category
labels’ such as letters.
Task is defined as “one of a set of differentiated, sequenceable goal-directed
activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures
relatable to the acquisition of pre-genre and genre skills appropriate to a
foreseen or emerging sociorhetorical situation” (p. 76). Tasks in a language-
centered approach would focus on grammar or vocabulary. Tasks in a
learner-centered approach would focus on functional/notional properties of
language. Tasks in a learning-centered approach (defined by Hutchinson and
Waters 1987) would focus on the negotiation of meaning.
One chapter is devoted to a discussion of the predominance of English as
the language of research and scholarship. The most conservative estimate is
that English accounts for 46% of published research in a specific area
(schistosomiasis), though the average appears to be closer to 75%, and there
is evidence that this percentage is increasing.
The largest subdivision of the text is a detailed explication of one particular
genre: the research report. Swales provides a comprehensive review of the
research available on the structure of research reports and then devotes
his attention to the four primary components: introduction, methods and
materials, results, and discussion. In the introduction segment, he elaborates
upon his CARS (Create a Research Space) model with its three principal
‘moves’ (establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and occupying a niche)
and goes on to discuss, for example, choice of verb tense and the use of
inanimate subjects with active verbs. He provides similar, though shorter,
discussions of the remaining elements of research reports and then describes
other research genres (e.g., abstracts, grant proposals, theses and disserta-
tions) in lesser detail.
The text concludes by discussing the application of the notion of genre
analysis in the classroom. Swales suggests four pedagogical ‘orientations’ to
this end: using case studies that describe how individual students have
grappled with the notion of genre; raising students’ rhetorical consciousness
regarding genre-specific texts; having students do ethnographic investiga-
tions of instructors, assignments, writing conventions, etc., in their chosen
fields; and making use of the recursive nature of the process approach to
writing.
The detail and the comprehensiveness of this text make it invaluable
reading for anyone who teaches or does research in EAP writing, both for
nonnative and native speakers of English. The lengths to which Swales goes
to make his ideas intelligible and useful allow us to see throughout the text a
true teacher, devoted not only to EAP students in the classroom but to the
right of non-English speaking researchers to a fair share of the research
domain.
 Book notices 289

References

&ales, John, 1985. Episodes in ESP. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Hutchinson, Tom and Alan Waters, 1987. English for specific purposes: A learning-centered
approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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