Genre Analysis

English in Academic and Research

Settings

John M. .S, Wales

 The role of language in academic settings is of vital
importance to all
 John Swales has provided an approach to the
understanding of academic discourse.
 Genre analysis thus adds our understanding of how
language is used within an important discourse
community.
 Genre analysis is a model of applied linguistics in its
best sense.
 It draws on linguistic and sociolinguistic theory to
clarify the nature of language use and language
learning in an educational setting
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 The approach develops and makes use of three
concepts:
-Discourse community
-Genre
-Language Learning task
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 Genre analysis as a means of studying spoken and
written discourse for applied ends.
 Genre centered approach offers a way of making
sense of the myriad communicative events.
 In his research he tried to built a bridge b/w English
for specific Purposes/Applied Discourse Analysis on
the other side and L1 writing composition on the
other
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 A prototypical study of this kind would involve
investigating the occurrence of verb forms in
scientific English such as in Huddleston (1971).
 Barber (1962), for instance was able to show that
continuous tenses were so rare in scientific prose that
they could be virtually discounted.
 Narrowing of textual scope has been compensated for
by an interest in providing a deeper of multi-layered
textual account
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 Genre analysis findings are no longer viewed simply in
terms of stylistic appropriacy, but increasingly, in terms of
the contributions they may or may not make to
communicative effectiveness.
 This approach has proved useful for establishing
authorship, it can reveal, with the help of communicative
character of what was written. It cannot of its nature deal
with discourse.
(Widdowsons’s 1979: 55-6 )
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 Work is ESP, by the middle eighties, not merely in
characterizing; it was also concerned to seek out the
determinants of those effects. In thus, of its nature,
deals with the communicative character of discourse.
 Teachers of English will have to adopt a rhetorical
approach to the study of writing in the disciplines , an
approach that examines the negotiation of meaning
among writers, readers and subject matters
Genre Analysis-Setting the Scene

 Aims and Purposes

 While it remains necessary to use texts in order to
understand how texts organize themselves
informationally, rhetorically and stylistically,
textually, textual knowledge remains generally
insufficient for a full account of genre.
 Cronin (1981) has argued, citing the works of others
is a private process but with a public face.
Skills and Strategy Studies
Skills and Strategy Studies

 He notes that parallelism b/w headline and title, lead

and abstract, main event and major findings, and so
on. He is further able to show that while newspaper
reports are structured so as to assist the reader in the
search for newsworthiness. (Van Dijk, 1986)
The concept of Discourse
Community

 use of the term ‘discourse community’ testifies to the

increasingly common assumption that discourse
operates within conventions defined by the
communities.
 Discourse community signifies cluster of ideas: that
language use in a formal group is a form of social
behavior
 Discourse is a means of maintaining and extending
the group’s knowledge and of initiating new members
into the group, and that discourse is epistimetic or
constitutive of the group’s knowledge.
Speech Communities and
Discourse Communities

 “ A speech community is defined , then, tautologically

but radically, as a community sharing knowledge of
rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech.
Such sharing comprises knowledge of at least one
form of speech , and knowledge also of its patterns of
use. Both conditions ae necessary.”
 In terms of the fabric of society , speech communities
are centripetal (they tend to absorb people into the
general fabric)
Definitions of Discourse
Community

 While a discourse community recruits its members

by persuasion, training or relevant qualification.
 “ A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of
common public goals”.
 “ A discourse community has mechanisms of
intercommunication among its members.
 “A discourse community uses its participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and
feedback”.
Definitions of Discourse
Community

 “ A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses

one or more genres in the communicative furtherance
of its aims.”
 “In addition to owing genres, a discourse community
has acquired some specific lexis.”
 “ A discourse community has a threshold level of
members with a suitable degree of relevant content
and discoursal expertise.
Types of Genres

Advertisements, Folk Songs

Newspapers Headlines
Literacy Practices
Classroom Discussions, FGD
.Semiotic Discourses, Religious Sermons etc
Types of genres
Classroom Discussion
Focus Group Discussion
Conclusion

.Genre Analysis is rapidly increasing domain of CDA

Different Genres need different approaches and methodologies to decode

them

Genre Centered Approaches must be devised carefully carefully

keeping in mind linguistic and metal-linguistic features