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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472029761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2013 |
| Series: | The Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Genre and Second Language Writing
By Ken Hyland
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2004 University of Michigan PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03014-9
CHAPTER 1
Why Genre?
Genre is a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations. For many people, it is an intuitively attractive concept that helps to organize the common-sense labels we use to categorize texts and the situations in which they occur. The concept of genre is based on the idea that members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognizing similarities in the texts they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such texts to read, understand, and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is, in part, because writing is a practice based on expectations: the reader's chances of interpreting the writer's purpose are increased if the writer takes the trouble to anticipate what the reader might be expecting based on previous texts he or she has read of the same kind.
Hoey (2001) likens readers and writers to dancers following each other's steps, each assembling sense from a text by anticipating what the other is likely to do by making connections to prior texts. While writing, like dancing, allows for creativity and the unexpected, established patterns often form the basis of any variations. We know immediately, for example, whether a text is a recipe, a joke, or a love letter and can respond to it immediately and even construct a similar one if we need to. As teachers, we are able to engage in more specialized genres such as lesson plans, student reports, and class examinations, bringing a degree of expertise to the ways we understand or write familiar texts. In more precise terms, we possess a schema of prior knowledge that we share with others and can bring to the situations in which we read and write to express ourselves efficiently and effectively.
Today, genre is one of the most important and influential concepts in language education, signifying what Ann Johns (2002, p. 3) has recently referred to as "a major paradigm shift" in literacy studies and teaching. We will return to a more detailed discussion of what genre is in chapter 2, but it might be useful here, at the beginning of a book about genre, to ask why there has been such a shift.
What is it about genre that gives it such a central place in current writing theory and teaching? This chapter sets out to answer this question, raising some of the main advantages and problems with genre and placing it in the context of current L2 writing teaching.
Genre-Based Writing Teaching
Genre-based teaching is concerned with what learners do when they write. An understanding of the concept allows writing teachers to identify the kinds of texts that students will have to write in their target occupational, academic, or social contexts and to organize their courses to meet these needs. Curriculum materials and activities are therefore devised to support learners by drawing on texts and tasks directly related to the skills they need to participate effectively in the world outside the ESL classroom.
For writing teachers, genre pedagogies promise very real benefits. The concept of genre enables teachers to look beyond content, composing processes, and textual forms to see writing as an attempt to communicate with readers — to better understand the ways that language patterns are used to accomplish coherent, purposeful prose. Genre adherents argue that people don't just write, they write something to achieve some purpose: writing is a way of getting things done. To get things done, to tell a story, request an overdraft, craft an essay, describe a technical process, and so on, we follow certain social conventions for organizing messages, and these conventions can be described and taught. For writing teachers, therefore, genre is a useful concept because it pulls together language, content, and contexts, offering teachers a means of presenting students with explicit and systematic explanations of the ways writing works to communicate.
It is important to note that genre approaches to writing instruction do not represent a single set of teaching techniques that can simply be followed in a paint-by-numbers fashion in every classroom. Students have different proficiencies, motivations, goals, and language needs. They study in contexts where English is taught as a second or foreign language, and they learn to write for different purposes and in different genres. But while genre is a term that embraces a variety of classroom practices, at its core it recognizes that the features of a similar group of texts depend on the social contexts in which the texts are created and used and that those features should form part of a writing syllabus.
Why Genre Is Gaining Attention in L2 Writing Instruction
While genre theories have evolved in different circumstances and in response to different problems, they have attracted growing interest because the idea of genre can help us to understand the ways individuals use language to engage in particular communicative situations and to employ this knowledge to help student writers create communicatively effective texts. Genre pedagogies have emerged in L2 writing classes as a response to process pedagogies, as an outcome of communicative methods, and in consequence of our growing understanding of literacy.
Genre as a Response to Process Methods
In part, L2 classroom applications of genre represent a corrective reaction to the individualistic, discovery-oriented approaches to writing that characterized learner-centered classrooms until recently. In the 1970s and 1980s, psycholinguistic and cognitive theories dominated language teaching, and writing teachers were encouraged to focus on general principles of thinking and composing. Writing was seen as a skill that was essentially learned, not taught, and the teacher's role was to be non-directive, facilitating writing through an encouraging and cooperative environment with minimal interference. There is little doubt that this approach has served to instill greater respect for individual writers and for the writing process itself, but because it has little to say about the ways meanings are socially negotiated, it failed to consider the forces outside the individual that help guide purposes, establish relationships, and ultimately shape writing.
Essentially, process methods often postpone input on form and expression to the end of the drafting and revising process so that writers can learn to freely express themselves unencumbered by thoughts of "correctness." This is particularly true in the Expressivist orientation, which urges teachers to provide considerable opportunities for writing, encourage creativity, and respond to the ideas that learners produce, rather than dwell on formal errors (e.g., Murray, 1985). In more cognitively influenced versions, there may be some attention given to discourse structure early in the process (e.g., Raimes, 1992). There is, however, still an emphasis on a planning-writing-reviewing framework (Flower and Hayes, 1981), which tends to focus learners on reflecting on the strategies they use to write rather than on the language and patterns they require to do this effectively. Students are generally expected to discover the language they need in the process of writing itself.
Unfortunately, many teachers felt that such a hands-off facilitative approach cast them in the role of well-meaning bystanders with little to say about the ways texts are conventionally structured and used. They found it was unreasonable to presuppose that their students were familiar with key genres as, in fact, L2 writers often have an incomplete control of English and rely on teachers to help them develop the linguistic resources they need to express themselves effectively (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Hasan, 1996). Delpit (1988, p. 287), for example, makes the point strongly:
Adherents to process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that "product" is not important. In this country [U.S.] students will be judged on their product regardless of the process they utilized to achieve it. And that product, based as it is on the specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit.
For genre teachers, it is not enough to equip students with the strategies of good writers and step back to let them get on with it. Providing students with the "freedom" to write may encourage fluency, but it does not liberate them from the constraints of grammar and form in public contexts of writing.
Genre and Communicative Language Teaching
In another sense, genre-based writing instruction is the heir of communicative approaches to language teaching that emerged in the 1970s. Hymes (1972) introduced the idea of communicative competence to account for the two kinds of knowledge crucial to successful language use: the knowledge of language and the knowledge of when to use it appropriately. The term generated a range of approaches known collectively as Communicative Language Teaching (see Richards & Rogers, 1986) constructed around this core idea of the role language plays in social contexts. Genre-based teaching continues this communicative tradition by guiding students to the ways they can most effectively achieve their purposes by systematically relating language to context.
Genre-based pedagogies rest on the idea that ways of writing are community resources for creating social relationships, rather than solely the property of individual writers struggling with personal expression. Good writers are aware that what a reader finds in a text is always influenced by what he or she has found in previous texts and that what writers want to say is necessarily affected by what readers expect them to say. Because of this, context is not just the background against which writing takes place; it is co-constructed by the writer and reader anticipating each other's responses and needs and co-constructing meaning through discourse. Writers are always influenced by the social activity they are engaged in, by their relationship with readers, and by the development of the progress of the interaction. Their choices of grammar, vocabulary, content, and organization therefore depend on the situations in which they are writing, and these options can form the basis of L2 writing programs.
Genre and New Literacy
Closely linked to their relationship to communicative teaching, genre pedagogies complement research in New Literacy Studies, which regards literacy as social practice (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 1998). This view of literacy shows that writing (and reading) vary with context and cannot be distilled to a set of abstract cognitive or technical abilities. There are a wide variety of practices relevant to and appropriate for particular times, places, participants, and purposes, and these practices are not something that we simply pick up and put down; they are integral to our individual identity, social relationships, and group memberships.
In New Literacy views, literacies are mainly acquired through exposure to discourses from a variety of social contexts, and through this exposure, individuals gradually develop theories of genre. In educational contexts, reading and writing are therefore curriculum-wide processes rather than simply "English" activities as each curriculum area requires and offers opportunities for different kinds of writing. This means that students can naturally encounter and may need to be taught a wide range of genres. It also suggests that teachers cannot ignore the diverse genres and literacy demands students will face outside the classroom and should provide texts and tasks that mirror the kinds of interactions they will have with these. In practice, this means recognizing that writing is always purposeful, that it demands a range of skills and understandings of various genres, that it relies on knowledge of other texts, and that it has definite outcomes. Writing, in other words, is always situated.
This view also offers writing teachers a radical new perspective on what they do, for the naive assumption that writing and teaching writing are somehow neutral, value-free activities is no longer defensible. This view encourages us to acknowledge not only that writing is used in many ways across many social contexts but also that only some of these have institutional and cultural stature. It is not the case that all genres are created equal, because they are associated with and are used to regulate entry into social communities possessing more or less prestige and influence.
Advantages of Genre-Based Writing Instruction
A number of advantages are often given for the use of genre-based writing instruction. The main advantages can be summarized as follows. Genre teaching is:
Explicit. Makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of writing skills
Systematic. Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language and contexts
Needs-based. Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from student needs
Supportive. Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding student learning and creativity
Empowering. Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valued texts
Critical. Provides the resources for students to understand and challenge valued discourses
Consciousness raising. Increases teacher awareness of texts to confidently advise students on their writing
These advantages are set out more fully in the following sections.
Genre-Based Teaching Is Explicit
Perhaps the most important advantage is that genre-based writing instruction seeks to offer writers an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured and why they are written in the ways they are. ESL teachers can rarely rely on their students having the appropriate cultural, social, and linguistic background they need to write effectively in English for Anglophone audiences. They have to assume that students' current literacy abilities may be widely different from those that they need in such contexts. Clear and explicit genre descriptions are required to bridge this gap. Learning to write involves acquiring an ability to exercise appropriate linguistic choices, both within and beyond the sentence, and teachers can assist this by providing students with examples of the language they need to create effective texts. As Christie (1989, p. 45) observes, making clear "the ways in which patterns of language work for the shaping of meanings" empowers both writers and teachers.
This explicitness gives teachers and learners something to shoot for, a "visible pedagogy" that makes clear what is to be learned rather than relying on hit-or-miss inductive methods whereby learners are expected to acquire the genres they need from the growing experience of repetition or the teacher's notes in the margins of their essays (Hyland, 2003). Providing writers with a knowledge of appropriate language forms shifts writing instruction from the implicit and exploratory to a conscious manipulation of language and choice.
Genre-Based Teaching Systematically Addresses Texts and Contexts
A second key advantage is that a genre orientation incorporates both discourse and contextual aspects of language use that may be neglected when attending to only structures or processes. To create a well-formed and effective text, students need to know how such texts are organized and the lexico-grammatical patterns that are typically used to express meanings in the genre. In addition, however, they also need to know the social purposes of the text type; the kinds of situation in which its use is appropriate; who the probable audience is, what readers are likely to know, and the roles and relationships of text users; the types of textual variation that are typical and possible; how the genre is related to others in the target context; and so on.
Linking texts and contexts in this way has two important advantages. First, it means that teaching materials are based on the ways language is actually used in particular writing contexts rather than on our general impressions of what happens. Teaching, in other words, is data-driven rather than intuition-driven. Second, while genre teachers focus on texts, this is not simple training in reproducing discourse forms, nor is it a narrow focus of disembodied grammar. Instead, linguistic patterns are seen as pointing to contexts beyond the page, implying a range of social constraints and choices, so that students are offered a way of seeing how different texts are created in distinct and recognizable ways in terms of their purpose, audience, and message.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Genre and Second Language Writing by Ken Hyland. Copyright © 2004 University of Michigan Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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