Introducing Genre and English for

Specific Purposes

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 analyzed and include:

 different possibilities for planning and designing an ESP genre-based

course;
 the concrete, micro aspects of materials creation;
 how genres can be learned through play.

Featuring tasks and practical examples throughout, the book is essential

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

Sunny Hyon is Professor of English at California State University, San

Bernardino, USA.
Routledge Introductions to English for Specific Purposes provide a compre-
hensive and contemporary overview of various topics within the area of
English for Specific purposes, written by leading academics in the field.
Aimed at postgraduate students in applied linguistics, English language
teaching and TESOL, as well as pre- and in-service teachers, these books
outline the issues that are central to understanding and teaching English for
specific purposes, and provide examples of innovative classroom tasks and
techniques for teachers to draw on in their professional practice.

SERIES EDITOR: BRIAN PALTRIDGE

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney. He has taught
English as a second language in Australia, New Zealand and Italy and has pub-
lished extensively in the areas of academic writing, discourse analysis and
research methods. He is editor emeritus for the journal English for Specific Pur-
poses and co-edited the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (Wiley, 2013).

SERIES EDITOR: SUE STARFIELD

Sue Starfield is a Professor in the School of Education and Director of The
Learning Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research and
publications include tertiary academic literacies, doctoral writing, writing for
publication, identity in academic writing and ethnographic research methods.
She is a former editor of the journal English for Specific Purposes and co-editor
of the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (Wiley, 2013).

TITLES IN THIS SERIES

Introducing English for Academic Purposes

Maggie Charles and Diane Pecorari

Introducing Needs Analysis and English for Specific Purposes

James Dean Brown

Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes

Sunny Hyon

Introducing English for Specific Purposes

Laurence Anthony

Introducing Course Design and English for Specific Purposes

Lindy Woodrow

For more information on this series visit: www.routledge.com/series/RIESP

Introducing Genre and English
for Specific Purposes

Sunny Hyon
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

PART I
Introduction 1
1 Introducing genre in English for Specific Purposes 3

PART II
ESP genre analysis 25
2 Analyzing genre moves 27
3 Analyzing lexicogrammatical features 51
4 Analyzing genre contexts 74

PART III
ESP genre-based learning and teaching 99
5 Designing genre-based courses 101
6 Creating and assessing genre-based teaching materials 130
7 Exploring future issues: genre play, learning, and transfer 163

References 186
Index 202
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to various people who supported this project in multiple ways. My

heartfelt thanks to Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield for approaching me about
writing the book and for their cheerful encouragement and patience during the
extended writing process; to the proposal reviewers for their thoughtful,
useful, and kind comments; to Helen Tredget of Routledge for her gracious
emails, gentle nudges, and readiness to help; to Jessica Lee for her excellent
feedback on the manuscript through the eyes of a former MA student and
for her ingenious system of tracking my citations and references; to Lisa
Bartle and Stacy Magedanz—CSUSB reference librarians extraordinaire—for
their ability to find anything and for setting up my personalized source-
finding page (I use it constantly!); and to Juvette McNew of Interlibrary
Loan, who cheerfully helped with hard-to-get sources. Thanks also to my
awesome CSUSB English Department colleagues and to my friends and
family for encouraging and supporting me through this long process. I con-
tinue to be deeply grateful to John Swales—for being a superb dissertation
advisor and mentor, for inspiring and engaging the field of ESP all of these
years, and for teaching me the art of the task. Finally, I wish to thank my
students—past, present, and future—for their energy and desire to learn. As
I wrote this book, I tried to imagine what you might find useful.
Part I

Introduction
This page intentionally left blank
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 pur-
pose, content, form, and/or context. Wedding invitations, for example, com-
prise 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
4 Introduction

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 mem-
bers. 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 flexi-
bility 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 char-
acterized 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
 Introducing genre in ESP 5

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 his-
torical 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
6 Introduction

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
 Introducing genre in ESP 7

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.
8 Introduction

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 experi-
ence 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 across several physical
paragraphs (p. 130).
It was also in this later period of early EST work that the term discourse
was used to refer to larger text segments. The conceptual paragraph, for
example, was argued to be “the basic unit of discourse” (Lackstrom, Selinker,
& Trimble, 1973, p. 130). Bley-Vroman (1978) also referenced “the total
discourse purpose” that is achieved through a scientific text’s organization
(p. 286). Now in retrospect, this focus on ‘macro’ discourse structures pre-
viewed subsequent work on genre moves, discussed in Chapter 2. In these
earlier days of ESP, however, the term genre was not much in circulation and
the textual categories studied for organization were often quite broad, like
description, recommendation, and classification, rather than the more specific
categories, like scientific journal articles, characteristic of ESP genre studies.
With the emerging focus on discourse organization, EST teaching materials
also changed. They moved beyond sentence pattern drills to exercises that
asked students to examine how different elements functioned within the
larger text. The excerpt below from Swales’ (1971) Writing Scientific English
illustrates this more analytical approach: Students are presented with a
passage (on water taps) and asked to identity what the purposes of the
paragraphs and their sentences are (or are not) within the context of the
whole passage.

A water tap is a device for turning on and off a flow of water. Its most
important parts are a rod with a handle on the top and a washer which
is fixed to the bottom of the rod. The metal parts of a water tap are
usually made of brass because brass resists corrosion. The washer is
made of a flexible material such as rubber or plastic.
 Introducing genre in ESP 9

[diagram of a water tap]

When the handle is turned the rod either rises or descends because of
the spiral thread. The column descends until the washer fits firmly in its
‘seat’. (This position is shown in the diagram.) The tap is now closed
and no water can flow out of the pipe.

Exercise 8(a) Cross out the wrong alternatives (S=sentence)

1 This description consists of 1/2/8 paragraphs.
2 The first paragraph describes a tap/explains how it works.
3 The second paragraph describes a tap/explains how it works
4 Each paragraph contains 1/3/4/6 sentences.
5 The first sentence (S1) is/is not a definition.
6 S2 describes the main moving parts of a tap/the main fixed parts.
7 S3 explains why brass resists corrosion/why brass is used.
8 S4 explains/does not explain why rubber is often used for a washer.
9 S5 begins with a subordinate clause/a main clause.
10 S6 explains/does not explain why the column goes down.
11 S7/S8 links the description to the diagram.
12 S7 must come before S8/it doesn’t matter which sentence comes first.
(from Swales, 1971, pp. 103–104)

Such exercises are not unlike later ‘consciousness-raising’ activities used in

genre-based pedagogies (see Chapter 6).

Genre is in the air: Swales, moves and CARS

ESP’s explicit shift toward genre came in the early 1980s. It was at this time
that EST scholarship and teaching materials began focusing on quite specific
genre categories, as seen in, for example, Tarone et al.’s (1981) analysis of two
astrophysics research articles, and specifically, how passive voice functioned
within them. Appearing in the inaugural issue of The ESP Journal (now English
for Specific Purposes), Tarone et al.’s article was indeed groundbreaking in
more than one way. It was among the first ESP publications to use the term
genre. And it did so to emphasize that scientific English was not monolithic but
rather could vary across genres. As the authors wrote in their conclusion: “It
should not simply be assumed that the passive is generally used more frequently
in EST … . Is the passive used more frequently in all genres of EST? If not, why
do we find variation in its usage?” (p. 136, italics added).
Interestingly, it was also in 1981 that John Swales, then a member of the
Language Studies Unit at the University of Aston in Birmingham, published
a seminal report on the genre of research articles (RAs). Entitled Aspects of
Article Introductions, Swales’ monograph differed from Tarone et al.’s study
of whole astrophysics RAs in that it focused specifically on the structure of
10 Introduction

RA introductions from various disciplines (Swales, 2011/1981). Swales’

investigation was groundbreaking in that it analyzed discourse organization
in terms of moves, an approach that became (and remains) highly influential
in ESP genre analysis (Samraj, 2014). In a later work, Swales (2004) defines a
move as “a discoursal or rhetorical unit that performs a coherent commu-
nicative function in a written or spoken discourse” (Swales, 2004, p. 229). In
this view, therefore, a move is “a functional, not a formal, unit” (p. 228) and
can be as short as a word or as long as several paragraphs. Inside each
move, there can also be multiple ‘steps’ (or sub-moves) through which the
move is actually performed.
Swales (2011/1981) saw moves and steps of article introductions as especially
challenging for RA writers (and therefore for EST students), in part because
they involved decisions about how to get the attention of their readers. From
his sample of 48 RA introductions in several science and social science fields, he
found that the introduction tended to follow a four-move sequence:

Move 1 Establishing the Field

Move 2 Summarizing Previous Research
Move 3 Preparing for Present Research
Move 4 Introducing Present Research

About a decade later, Swales (1990) removed “summarizing previous

research” as a separate move because, as he observed, authors often engaged
in this strategy throughout their RA introduction rather than in a discrete
section. In this three-move model, Swales also renamed the moves in “eco-
logical” terms (1990, p. 142), Establishing a Territory, Establishing a Niche,
Occupying the Niche, reflecting the idea that RA authors compete for space
in a scholarly ecosystem. With this orientation, Swales called his updated
moves model “Create a Research Space,” or CARS, shown in Figure 1.1.
In Move 1, Swales noted, RA authors may begin to carve out their
research space by establishing their general research area or territory as
“central in some way to the discipline” (Swales, 2011/1981, p. 33), such as in
the following examples:

In recent years, applied researchers have become increasingly interested

in …
Thus, the study of these has become an important aspect of …
The well-known … phenomena … have been favourite topics for ana-
lysis both in …
(Swales, 2011/1981, pp. 33–34, italics added)

In Move 2, RA authors directly create a niche for themselves in the existing

research territory by highlighting a limitation, gap, or remaining question in
previous research, or by indicating they are extending current scholarship in
 Introducing genre in ESP 11

Figure 1.1 CARS moves model for RA introductions

Source: Adapted from Swales (1990, p. 141, Figure 10).

some way. The linguistic signals of this move often include negative sen-
tence connectors, verbs, and adjectives, as in the following sentence:

However, the previously mentioned methods suffer from some limitations.

(Swales, 1990, p. 154, italics added)

Swales (2004) later added an optional step of “Presenting Positive Justification”

to Move 2 (p. 230) based on Samraj’s (2002) finding that, after pointing out what
is lacking in previous research, authors may state a positive reason for doing their
research. In other words, it is not just because others have not done something
that it should be done but also because it may actually be useful to do it.
Finally, in Move 3, authors announce how they will occupy the research
niche by describing their own study, its purposes, and/or findings. Typical of
this move are present tense verbs and deictic expressions like this preceding
a noun referring the authors’ project, as in:

In this paper, we give preliminary results of …

(Swales, 1990, p. 160, italics added)

Although the three CARS moves may prototypically follow the 1-2-3 order
above, Swales (1990) also indicated that they can be cyclical; that is, they
may re-occur at different points in an RA introduction. Task 1.1 gives you a
chance to take the CARS moves out for a drive.
12 Introduction

Task 1.1 Trying out CARS

1 Find three different peer-reviewed academic journals. They can be from

the same field or from different fields.
2 In each journal, find an RA; that is, collect three RAs in total.
3 Read the introduction of each of your three RAs. Mark in the introduction
wherever you see one of Swales’ CARS moves and label it. Circle words or
phrases that signal the moves.
4 To what extent does each introduction conform or deviate from his CARS
model?

Genre, communicative purpose, and discourse community

In addition to introducing the field to moves analysis, Swales established a
sort of ESP theory of genre through definitions of key genre-related con-
cepts. Below is Swales’ oft-cited 1990 description of genre, which built on
his 1981 ideas and which he later revisited and took in different directions.

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of

which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are
recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community,
and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes
the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains
choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged
criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here
conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addi-
tion to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of simi-
larity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all
high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed
as prototypical by the parent discourse community. The genre names
inherited and produced by discourse communities and imported by
others constitute valuable ethnographic communication, but typically
need further validation.
(Swales, 1990, p. 58)

Genre as a class of communicative events

In this statement, Swales calls genre a class of communicative events,
reminding us that a genre is not itself a text but rather a category of texts.
For example, the email message that you wrote this morning is not a genre
but rather one member of the textual class (i.e., genre) known as email
messages. In this way, in fact, a genre is an abstraction: We cannot actually
see, hear, or produce a genre. Rather, we see, hear, and produce instances
 Introducing genre in ESP 13

TV commercial genre

TV commercial 1 TV commercial 2 TV commercial 3. Etc.

(for frozen pizza) (for car insurance) (for a smart phone)

Figure 1.2 A genre and its communicative events

(or what Swales calls “communicative events”) of a genre. The simple graphic
in Figure 1.2, using the example of television commercials, illustrates this
concept further: The genre (class) of TV commercials is comprised of all of
the TV commercials in the world (communicative events in this class); we
do not watch that genre, but instead watch the individual TV commercials,
and from observing their commonalities become aware of the genre, or
category, to which they belong.

Task 1.2 Genre as a category of events

Assuming Swales’ view of genre as a class of communicative events, which
statement (a or b) is more accurate? Explain your answer.

a Betty writes within the research article genre.

b Betty writes the research article genre.

Genre and communicative purpose

Another key concept in Swales’ 1990 genre definition is communicative purpose.
Indeed, Swales has called it a “privileged criterion,” given that it is through
sharing “some set of communicative purposes” that texts are identified as
belonging to the same genre (Swales, 1990, p. 58). These genre members’
shared purposes, said Swales, also “constitute the rationale for the genre,”
which in turn shapes its discourse structure (i.e., moves), style, and content
characteristics. Returning to our simple example of TV commercials, we see
how communicative purpose might work in this way. The short segments in
between TV programs—whether they be for frozen pizza, car insurance, or
a smart phone—are recognized as members of the TV commercial genre in
part because they have a common communicative purpose: to persuade
viewers to buy the advertised project. Given this purpose (or “rationale”),
commercials employ similar forms and content to make their product
appealing to viewers, including attractive colors, happy people, humor,
catchy music, and positive claims.
14 Introduction

Communicative purpose would seem to operate in this fashion in many

situations. However, about a decade after the 1990 definition, Askehave and
Swales (2001) offered a reconsideration of whether communicative purpose
should occupy such a central, genre-defining role. They highlighted the fact
that in a number of situations, a text’s communicative purpose may be
difficult to determine and therefore perhaps not be the ideal criterion for
determining the text’s genre. Drawing on a study by Witte (1992), for
example, they pointed out that genres we assume have an obvious purpose,
such as shopping lists, can actually vary in their functions: Shoppers, for
example, might use their lists to prevent impulse purchases, to organize their
shopping by the store aisles, or to convince a romantic interest at the
deli counter of their “fitness as a domestic partner”! (Askehave & Swales,
2001, p. 201).
Given the slipperiness of nailing down a text’s communicative purposes,
Askehave and Swales proposed two alternatives for identifying a text’s
genre: a text-first, “linguistic” approach, which begins by observing the
text’s structural and content features (e.g., a vertical listing of food items)
and, based on these features, making a first guess at the text’s genre and
purpose (e.g., a shopping list to aid the shopper’s memory). Afterward,
through a deeper look at the text’s context, observers may revise their first
impression of the genre’s purpose (i.e., “repurposing” it), and make adjust-
ments to their original identification of the text’s genre (i.e., “reviewing
genre status”) (p. 207). The second way is a context-first, “ethnographic”
approach, which begins instead by examining the community that uses the
text, including their values, goals, activities, and genre “repertoires,” and
finally, through deep understanding of the community context, considers the
purposes and genre of the text (p. 208). In either the text-first or the context-
first approach, identifying with certainty a text’s communicative purpose
comes late in the analytic process, which acknowledges that all the texts of
a particular genre—like shopping lists—may vary in their purposes
depending on situation. Thus, rather than being a starting point for iden-
tifying genre as it was in Swales’ earlier definition, understanding a text’s
communicative purpose, for Askehave and Swales, is a “reward or pay-off
for investigators” after a thorough investigation of textual and/or contextual
elements (p. 210).

Task 1.3 Identifying communicative purpose and genre:

two approaches
This task gives you an opportunity to try out Askehave and Swales’ (2001) text-first
and context-first approaches for identifying a text’s communicative purpose(s) and
genre; see discussion of these approaches in the section above.
Consider the following text, and then answer the questions that follow.
 Introducing genre in ESP 15

Melody Carpenter and Pat Sidney Reyes were married on January 9 at Heritage
Hall in Redlands, Massachusetts. Pastor Janet Tobias officiated. The bride, 38, is
keeping her name. She is a senior attorney for the Redlands District Attorney’s
office. She received a JD from Yale Law School after graduating with a BA in
English from California State University, San Bernardino. She is the daughter of
Dr. Rebecca Longacre and Dr. Malcolm R. Carpenter, both pediatric surgeons at
Community Hospital. The groom, 36, is the founder of GoUp, a non-profit
provider of social services for parolees. He graduated from the University of
Michigan with a Master’s in Public Health and a Bachelor’s in Social Work. He is
the son of Sara Reyes (née Jones), principal for the Lakeview School for Girls,
and Gene Reyes, lead planner for the Redlands Office of Urban Redevelopment.
The couple met at Likeminded.com.

1 Explain how you would determine the communicative purposes and genre
of this text using a text-first approach (see above).
2 Explain how you would do this using a context-first approach (see
above).
3 Which of these two approaches—text-first or context-first—most appeals
to you as a way to understand the communicative purposes of this or
other texts? Why?
4 What communicative purposes did you identify for the genre represented
by this text?
5 What would you call the genre of this text?
6 How might this genre be “re-purposed” in ways you would not think of
initially?

Genre and discourse community

Also central to Swales’ 1990 genre thinking is discourse community. As
Swales defined it, a discourse community is a network of people with a “set
of common public goals” that uses (and sometimes creates) genres to further
these goals (p. 24). To illustrate, we can think of a church group—a fairly
prototypical discourse community—that employs the genres of sermons,
newsletters, budget proposals, and prayer request cards to support the
interests and goals of its membership. This relationship between discourse
communities and genres is a possessive one: “[G]enres are the properties of
discourse communities,” argued Swales (1990, p. 9). And as such, discourse
communities differ from speech communities, which, rather than being
defined by common goals and genres, are bounded by a shared language, dialect
features, or geography. Thus, while a group of comet followers (hailing from
various languages and parts of the globe) could constitute a discourse com-
munity, residents of Hokkaido, Japan would be better characterized as a
speech community.
16 Introduction

In his later re-thinking of such arguments, Swales (1993; 2016) has acknowl-
edged that the concept of discourse community may not be so clear-cut, or
necessarily distinct from that of speech community. A geographically defined
group of people, for instance, could still have common interests. As Swales
writes, “we have university towns (Oxford, Ann Arbor, Madison); sporting
towns (St. Andrews, Newmarket, Saratoga), government towns (Ottawa,
Canberra), religious towns (Assis, Mecca)” (1993, p. 695). There also
exist at least semi-geographical “local discourse communities” defined by
particular physical places where people work, “as in a factory or a university
department” (2016, p. 5). In addition, with regard to genre, Swales (2016)
now suggests that use rather than possession better captures the genre-
discourse community relationship. He writes that genres are “rarely owned”
but rather can be “utilize[d]” by a discourse community “in the furtherance
of its sets of goals” (2016, p. 8). In addition, some genres appear to trans-
cend discourse communities. In their study of suicide notes, for example,
Samraj and Gawron (2015) suggest that this genre belongs to a broader,
perhaps even global, speech community rather than a specialized discourse
community.

Genre metaphors
Part of Swales’ genre re-thinking has involved not only a nuanced reconsi-
deration of genre’s relationships to communicative purpose and discourse
community, but also a demurring on whether a genre definition is useful at
all. In 2004, Swales writes that he is “less sanguine about the value and
viability of such definitional depictions” in part because they do not hold up
in all circumstances (as we have seen above) and because they prevent us
from seeing all there is to see in genres (2004, p. 61). In lieu of a singular
definition, then, Swales (2004) proposes that the genre concept be explored
in terms of various metaphors, each illuminating something different about
genre. His six metaphors are genre as frame that facilitates social action;
genre as standard that constrains what is appropriate in a given text; genre
as biological species that can “evolve, spread, and decline”; genre as families
where members have “a common genealogical history” yet vary in degree of
family resemblance; genres as institutions that embody community values;
and genres as speech acts that perform actions as called for by the situation
(pp. 61–68).
Applying several of these metaphors to, say, the obituary genre, we see
that each highlights a particular way this genre works in the world.
For example, an obituary is a frame that we use to remember the
deceased, and it performs this speech act of remembrance as directed by
certain circumstances. This genre also has some standard moves and
conventions of expression; yet, like a biological species, it has evolved in
unique ways in particular communities such that its family members,
 Introducing genre in ESP 17

although sharing some common origins and features, also exhibit varia-
tion. Regarding this latter point, Nwoye (1992) found that Nigerian,
German, and English (U.S. and British) newspaper obituaries displayed
linguistic differences that pointed to the influence of their cultural con-
texts. The Nigerian obituaries, for example, had much more frequent use
than the German or English ones of “expressions with strong religious
connotations” (p. 21), including departed this sinful world, transformed
into eternal glory, and joined the saints triumphant, which evolved out
of strong beliefs in the afterlife in Nigerian cultural and religious
traditions.

From Swales to an explosion of ESP genre research

It is hard to overstate the influence of Swales’ genre theorizing, re-theorizing,
and analyses on ESP genre research and teaching. Even in just narrow terms,
Swales’ CARS model illuminated in groundbreaking ways the rhetorically
complex introductions of published RAs, a “gargantuan,” knowledge-producing
genre for many academic fields (Swales, 1990, p. 95). More broadly, Swales’
work, particularly his style of moves analysis, has inspired many, many
analyses of other genres relevant to ESP students, including lectures, seminar
discussions, book critiques, blogs, sales letters, legal case studies, tourist
brochures, suicide notes, and research reports of various kinds, as a key-
word search on genre in ESP-related journals will reveal. Bawarshi and Reiff
(2010), in fact, observe that “[i]t is largely due to Swales’ work and the
research it has inspired over the last twenty years that ESP and genre
analysis have become in many ways synonymous” (p. 41). Swales has also
changed how text analysis is done, leading ESP researchers not only to study
discourse structure via moves analysis, but also to consider how moves are
shaped by a genre’s communicative purposes and by the communities that use
the genre.
The impact of Swalesian genre analysis is seen in ESP teaching materials
as well, including several popular graduate writing textbooks that engage
students in investigations and productions of various academic genres
(Swales & Feak, 2011, 2012; Feak & Swales, 2009). Swales’ genre re-thinkings
also have applications for ESP classrooms. His work with Askehave on
communicative purpose, for example, suggests that teachers (and students)
ought to take time to explore a genre’s contexts, uses, and forms before
(re)defining its purposes. In addition, Swales’ genre metaphors provide a
sense of how a genre can be taught from different angles, focusing on, for
example, its standard conventions, or the social action it accomplishes, or its
evolution over time, and so on. Indeed, Tardy (in Johns et al., 2006) has
argued that teaching just one such dimension at a time makes genre learning
less overwhelming, allowing ESP students to start with a single element and
then gradually integrate others.
18 Introduction

Task 1.4 Teaching different dimensions of genres

This task asks you to consider how Swales’ genre metaphors might inform your
own teaching of a particular genre. Imagine that you plan to teach a group of
non-native English-speaking graduate students about the genre of biostatements,
those descriptions of authors (often written by the authors themselves) found
at the end of an article, chapter, or book (see discussions of this genre in
Hyland, 2012; Swales & Feak, 2011; Tardy & Swales, 2014). Here is one such
biostatement from a 2015 article:

Jean Mark Gawron is Professor of Linguistics at San Diego State University.

His research interests include Statistical Parsing, Distributional Semantics,
and Formal Semantics. He has used distributional semantics to analyze the
language of white militant, climate change, and anti-vaccine websites,
focusing on the discovery of linguistic group membership markers.
(Samraj & Gawron, 2015, p. 101)

1 Find three or four sample biostatements at the end of a journal article,

chapter, or book.
2 What different aspects of biostatements could possibly be explored with
your ESP students? For ideas here, think about Swales’ (2004) different
metaphors for genre.
3 Which of these aspects of genre would you start with in a unit on
biostatements? Which would you conclude with? Why?
4 Design an activity to help students understand one of these dimensions of
biostatements.

ESP and other genre traditions

Thus far, this chapter has offered a thumbnail sketch of the evolution of
genre studies within ESP’s 50-year history, as summarized in the box
below.

Evolution of ESP genre studies

1960s–1970s: pre-genre EST (foundation for future genre work)

 EST analyses of scientific texts

 Early analyses: Frequently occurring grammatical items

 Later analyses: Rhetorical purposes of grammar and discourse organi-
zation (Washington School)
 Introducing genre in ESP 19

 Teaching materials
 Early materials: Grammatical pattern practice
 Later materials: Analysis and production of larger discourse segments

1980–1990: early genre work

 Analyzing grammar in a specific genre

 Passive voice in astrophysics research articles (Tarone et al.)

 Analyzing genre organization and content as moves

 CARS moves in research article introductions (Swales)
 Initial theories of genre

 Genre, communicative purpose and discourse community (Swales)

1990s–present: centrality of genre

 Explosion of ESP genre studies

 Ongoing revisions of genre theory

 Complexity of communicative purpose

 Genres in relation to speech communities and discourse communities
 Multiple metaphors for genre

 Genre-based teaching materials

This ‘story’ helps us not only to appreciate the progression of genre-related

ideas in ESP but also to understand ESP’s points of connection and divergence
with two other traditions of genre work: Rhetorical Genre Studies, also
known as ‘New Rhetoric’, and Australian genre approaches, also referred to
as the ‘Sydney School’. Although in recent years some of the differences
among these three traditions (and particularly those between ESP and
Rhetorical Genre Studies) may have become less sharp (Artemeva & Freedman,
2015; Swales, 2009b), each has had and continues to have distinctive
emphases. Comparing the three can illuminate both the uniqueness of ESP
genre work and its intersections with other bodies of genre work.

ESP and RGS

Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) refers to genre scholarship in the fields of
rhetoric, composition (i.e., first-year undergraduate writing), and profes-
sional writing. This work has tended to focus on genres within North
20 Introduction

American university and workplace contexts, and RGS consequently shares

ESP’s interest in advanced academic texts such as RAs (e.g., Bazerman,
1988) and professional genres (e.g., Schryer, 1993, 2002; Winsor, 2000). ESP
and RGS have diverged somewhat, however, in their approaches to analyzing
these genres. In broad terms, ESP genre analysis employs what Flowerdew
(2002, 2011) calls a “linguistic approach,” while RGS has favored a “contextual
approach.” That is, although genre context is not unimportant in ESP,
researchers working in this tradition have generally given greater ‘space’ to
describing genres’ discoursal and linguistic characteristics, including their
organizational moves, vocabulary, and grammatical features. This linguistic
orientation is in keeping with ESP’s history of explicating textual features.
RGS work, on the other hand, has been more concerned with analyzing
what rhetoric scholar Carolyn Miller (1984) describes as the social actions
that genres perform in their situational contexts. The following statement in
Miller’s (1984) seminal article captures this orientation: “[A] rhetorically
sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form
of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (p. 151).
In the RGS view, a genre’s social actions also have an important shaping
relationship to their contexts. As Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) describe, “RGS
has tended to understand genres not only as situated within contexts … but
also as constitutive of contexts” (p. 54). That is, genres, through the actions
they perform, are seen as helping to create, or at least participating in and
influencing, the contexts in which they are used. One RGS study with such
an approach is that of Winsor (2000) who investigated how an agricultural
equipment company’s ‘work order’ genre actually helped shape the company
environment by reinforcing political hierarchies between engineers and
technicians. And in a healthcare setting, Schryer et al. (2012) as well examined
the impact of a ‘dignity interview’ genre on palliative care contexts, particularly
in relation to patients’ sense of well-being.

ESP and Sydney School genre studies

ESP has also had points of connection and divergence with Sydney School
genre work, a tradition grounded in systemic-functional linguistics (SFL).
Developed by British-born linguist Michael Halliday, SFL is concerned with
relationships between language forms and their meanings in social contexts
(Martin, 2015; Rose, 2015). Within SFL-oriented Australian school-based
projects (Martin, 2015), genre has been described as a “staged, goal oriented
social process” that cultures use to carry out various functions (Martin,
Christie, & Rothery, 1987, p. 59). Such a definition resembles the ESP con-
cept of genres as having both communicative purposes and structural moves
(stages), as well as the RGS view of genres producing social actions.
Also like ESP, as Flowerdew notes (2011), Sydney School genre work has
tended to take a linguistic approach to genre analysis, producing fuller
 Introducing genre in ESP 21

descriptions of the organizational and linguistic properties of genres than of

the contexts where they carry out their social processes. One area where this
work has diverged from ESP (and from RGS), however, has been in the
categories of genres analyzed. Sydney School genre labels tend to be quite
broad, such as narrative, report, explanation, discussion, exposition, and
procedure (Macken-Horarik, 2002; Rose & Martin, 2012; Rose, 2015). Broad
categories like narrative have been called “pre-genres” in ESP (Swales, 1990,
p. 61) rather than genres in their own right. Sydney School genre projects, on
the other hand, have viewed these broader categories as “elemental genres”
(or ‘micro-genres’) that combine within ‘macrogenres’, i.e., ESP’s genres.

Views on genre-based teaching

ESP and Sydney School genre scholars have shared a strong belief in the
value of teaching students about genres, while RGS has been more ambivalent
about such instruction or at least certain manifestations of it (see discussions
in Hyon, 1996; Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010). ESP’s and the Sydney School’s
similar worldviews here may relate in part to their target student populations.
In ESP, these include non-native English speakers acquiring English language
skills for their current or future life paths. Likewise, some Australian genre
teaching projects have been geared for non-native English speakers in the
Adult Migrant English Program (Feez, 2002), as well as for economically
disadvantaged children in Sydney primary and secondary schools (Cope et al.,
1993; Rose & Martin, 2012). Because of their language learning and literacy
needs, these populations have been argued to benefit from explicit teaching
about academic and professional genres. Indeed, in Australian school con-
texts, genre-based instruction developed as a direct reaction against pro-
gressive, ‘process’ pedagogies, which genre scholars argued did not explicate
for students the genres they needed for academic success (Cope et al., 1993;
Rose and Martin, 2012).
Some RGS scholars, on the other hand, have expressed skepticism about
the value of classroom genre teaching. Freedman (1993, 1994) for example,
argued that direct teaching of genre features is unnecessary because genre
knowledge can be acquired unconsciously through exposure to and practice
using texts within natural contexts. Furthermore, although Freedman
acknowledged that instruction in genre features may have some limited
value “for students with the appropriate learning style,” she argues that such
teaching may also be “dangerous” if the instructor, who is likely an outsider
to the students’ target fields, has incomplete genre knowledge or if students
misapply the knowledge presented (Freedman, 1994, p. 206).
Such concerns about genre-based teaching may be linked to RGS’ “con-
textual approach” to genre (Flowerdew, 2011). Because genres are perceived
in the RGS tradition as so closely tied to their contexts and because contexts
are constantly changing, genres are also believed to be “fluid and dynamic”
22 Introduction

(Freedman, 1993, p. 232; see also Miller, 1984). As such, teaching genre
features accurately might be seen as impossible because “we may never be
able to specify or to articulate with assurance the rules for … genres”
(Freedman, 1993, p. 232). While ESP and Sydney School scholars also
recognize the changeability of genres and their contexts, they tend to assume
a greater degree of stability (and thus teachability) of genre characteristics.
RGS’s skepticism about genre teaching may also be due to the fact that
some of its scholars have focused on native-English-speaking university
students, who might be assumed to acquire genres more unconsciously than,
say, ESP populations.

Coalescence of traditions and remaining distinctions

Although I have presented distinctions among ESP, RGS, and Sydney School
approaches, as noted earlier, some have observed them to be coalescing to
a certain extent (Swales, 2009b). Among the three traditions, it is perhaps
ESP and RGS that have drawn closest to each other in both genre analysis
and pedagogy. Askehave and Swales’ (2001) “context-first” analysis option,
for example, reflects an RGS-style contextual orientation. Flowerdew
(2011) has also highlighted benefits for ESP of complementing linguistic
analysis with contextual analysis, as illustrated in his investigations of tax
accountant and auditor genres (Flowerdew & Wan, 2006, 2010). Johns
(2015a) also notes that although “much of ESP pedagogy and research
remains text internal,” in her own EAP teaching she advocates giving
students multiple opportunities to reflect “on the ecology of the situation”
of genres, probing with such questions as “Why was this text written?”,
“What events were going on when this text was written …?”, and “Was
it successful in achieving what the writer wanted to get done?” (pp. 367,
369–371).
As well, some RGS scholars have expressed belief in genre-based peda-
gogy in terms not unlike those used in ESP. Even in an early essay, RGS
scholar Richard Coe (1994) suggested, via a swimming analogy, that for at
least some students, direct genre teaching enhances genre learning (p. 159):

People learned to swim for millennia before coaches explicitly articu-

lated our knowledge of how to swim, but kids today learn to swim
better (and in less time) on the basis of that explicit knowledge …
Might it be true for writing as well?

One RGS undergraduate writing textbook, Scenes of Writing: Strategies for

Composing with Genres (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004) also assumes the
usefulness of genre-based teaching, with multiple activities guiding students
to analyze genres in terms of their contexts, forms, and social actions and to
produce their own texts within various genres.
 Introducing genre in ESP 23

Distinctions among the three traditions remain, however. For example,

Sydney School and ESP projects still generally differ in the level of specificity
of the genres analyzed and taught. Between ESP and RGS, the differences
seem to be more of degree than of kind. Both fields attend to linguistic and
contextual aspects of genres, though ESP tilts linguistic and RGS leans
contextual. Also, as discussed earlier, the goals of genre analysis and genre-
based pedagogy in these two fields are differently weighted: In ESP, impor-
tance is still placed on examining genre forms so that students can use them
appropriately in the contexts that call for them. RGS emphasizes students
understanding genres not only so that they can use them but also so that
they are aware of the social actions that genres perform and how these
actions empower or disempower their participants (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi,
2004).
I would also like to point out that genre work has not been limited to
these three (Anglophone) traditions. There is a long-running body of genre
work in Brazil, for example, characterized by its own theoretical and peda-
gogical approaches. As Motta-Roth and Heberle (2015) point out, Brazilian
genre work is a mélange of ESP, Sydney School, and RGS orientations, and
also integrates ‘socio-discursive interactionism’, a Swiss-originated paradigm
on discourse and teaching (see also Cristovão, 2015). In its hybridity, Brazilian
scholarship has also “rearticulate[d]” these various genre traditions to meet its
local educational concerns (Motta-Roth & Heberle, 2015, p. 24). For ESP
teachers, understanding these multiple genre fields is helpful in appreciating
the unique ways that ESP continues to evolve, as well as to intersect with
and depart from the work of genre colleagues around the world. For more
on various traditions of genre work, see Artemeva and Freedman (2015);
Bawarshi and Reiff (2010); Flowerdew (2002, 2011); Hyland (2004b); Hyon
(1996); Johns (2002); Motta-Roth and Heberle (2015).

Preview of the rest of this book

This chapter has considered the evolution of ESP approaches to genre and
the relationship of these approaches to those of other genre traditions. The
remaining six chapters invite you to explore further various aspects of ESP
genre work. Part II focuses on several dimensions of ESP genre analysis,
beginning with analysis of genre moves (Chapter 2) and lexicogrammatical
features of genres (Chapter 3), and then complementing these ‘linguistic’
methodologies with examination of genre contexts (Chapter 4). Through
these chapters, you will not only learn about previous ESP genre investiga-
tions but also gain experience doing textual and contextual analyses on your
own. Part III of the book then turns to ESP perspectives on and applications
for genre learning and teaching. Chapter 5 considers several ‘macro’ (big
picture) issues involved in designing a genre-based course so that it addresses
students’ needs and interests. Chapter 6 then turns to more ‘micro’ aspects
24 Introduction

of genre-based teaching, discussing ways of creating and assessing specific

classroom activities to enhance students’ awareness of and ability to use
genres. As in Part II, these two pedagogy-oriented chapters have a practical
bent, with opportunities for you practice planning your own genre-based
courses and classroom materials. Finally, Chapter 7 considers future directions
for ESP genre work, including the analysis of playful, convention-defying
genres and ways genre play can be used in ESP classrooms to promote
students’ long-term genre learning.
Part II

ESP genre analysis

This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 2

Analyzing genre moves

A major focus of ESP genre analysis has been on moves, those textual segments
that make up a genre’s organizational structure and help the genre achieve
its purposes. One reason for moves analysis’ popularity is that its findings
can be translated into genre moves models, such as Swales’ CARS, for use in
ESP classrooms. Of course, one fear about such models is that they will
be applied by ESP teachers or students as formulas rather than as flexible
guidelines. As we will see in this chapter and in Chapter 6, however, move
analysis and moves-focused teaching materials are also capable of addressing
genre variation and flexibility. In offering an overview of ESP moves analysis,
this chapter begins by considering what moves are and then describes pro-
cesses for examining them. These processes include text-focused moves
identification, consultation with expert informants, and comparison of genre
moves across different cultural contexts. At various points in the chapter
you will also have opportunities to practice moves analysis on your own.

What are moves?

A dance analogy
For those new to genre analysis, moves as a concept can be a bit challenging
to grasp, at least at first. I have found that a dance analogy borrowed from
my graduate student intern, Florelei Luib, helps newcomers ease into
understanding what moves are. Think of some dances that you know or
have heard of—perhaps the waltz, the jitterbug, a Chinese folk dance, the
Korean ‘Gangnam Style’ dance, a Bollywood dance, and so on. What most
readily differentiates these dances from one another? The likely answer is
their moves. Consider, for example, the distinctive three-step of the waltz,
or the Gangnam dance’s lasso movements. In a similar way, a spoken or
written genre, whether it be a business presentation, weather report, journal
article, or election ballot, is also distinguished by its moves—those pieces
within the genre that give it its characteristic shape. In addition, genres, like
dances, allow for variation across individual performances of their moves.
28 ESP genre analysis

We see such variation, for example, in two videos of ‘The Hustle’, a popular
American dance during the 1970s disco era (see screenshots below). Watch-
ing the two Hustle performances, one notices that they share several
common moves, such as walking forward and backward, which suggests
that these may be obligatory moves for this dance. But the second version
also contains different moves such as ‘the Travolta’ and ‘the chicken’; and in
both versions, each of the individual dancers brings a unique spirit to
executing the moves. Likewise, genres, such as those you might teach in an
ESP course will exhibit regular, even obligatory, move patterns. At the same
time, they may allow for move omissions or additions, as well as indivi-
dualized expressions of speakers’ and writers’ styles and personalities.

Moves as functional units

If you now have a rough sense of what moves are, you may still wonder what
they look like—are they words, sentences, paragraphs? Actually, genre moves
vary in size and are identified by what they do in a text rather than by their exact
form. Emphasizing this function-over-form criterion, Swales (2004) writes:

A ‘move’ in genre analysis is a discoursal or rhetorical unit that performs a

coherent communicative function in a written or spoken discourse.
Although it has sometimes been aligned with a grammatical unit such as a
sentence, utterance, or paragraph … , it is better seen as flexible in terms of
its linguistic realization. At one extreme, it can be realized by a clause; at
the other by several sentences. It is a functional, not a formal, unit.
(Swales, 2004, pp. 228–229)

Figure 2.1 “Do the Hustle” (screenshot)

Source: meerrd08, YouTube (30 Nov. 2008). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
0ZyQIh0sH5A.
 Analyzing genre moves 29

Figure 2.2 “(how to) do the hustle” (screenshot)

Source: Ousama Itani, YouTube (27 July 2006). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?
v=7TsRdkrxl4g.

One might even extend Swales’ boundaries further and speculate that some
moves can be as small as a word or two (e.g., a “Sincerely” at the end of a
business letter) or as large as several paragraphs (e.g., assessment of food in
a restaurant review).
This idea that moves are functional units is important to keep in mind
when doing your own moves analysis or helping your students do one.
Genre analysis neophytes sometimes incorrectly describe moves in terms
of what certain text parts are saying rather than what they are doing.
This may be because they are more used to talking about a text’s content
than about the purposes of its different parts. When analyzing a restau-
rant review, for example, students might label a move as ‘the waiter’s
friendliness’ rather than as ‘evaluating the service’—the latter being a
more productive and functionally oriented move label, extendable to
other instances of the restaurant review genre (even when the waiter was
not friendly!).

Moves, genres, and communicative purposes

Moves can also be understood in terms of their relationship to a genre’s
overarching communicative purposes. As we saw in Chapter 1, commu-
nicative purpose is a key dimension of ESP conceptions of genre (Askehave
30 ESP genre analysis

& Swales, 2001; Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990). Given that individual moves
in a genre perform particular functions, we can think of them as fulfilling
‘mini communicative purposes’ that together serve the genre’s larger com-
municative purposes. The CARS moves in an RA introduction (Establish-
ing a Territory, Establishing a Niche, Occupying the Niche), for example,
collectively achieve the global communicative purpose of creating a
research space for RA writers. Or, to take a spoken genre example, the
moves in a wedding toast, such as describing the bride and groom’s posi-
tive qualities, illustrating them with anecdotes, and wishing them future
happiness, help to achieve the toast’s broader goals of honoring the couple
and entertaining the guests.
To sum up then, moves are textual segments that help classify a text as a
member of a particular genre; they perform specific functions that contribute
to the genre’s overarching purposes; and, although they often exhibit con-
ventional patterns, they may vary in their shape and style depending on the
text, situation, and individuals ‘dancing’ them.

How to do a moves analysis

Few published ESP genre studies describe the processes that the authors used
to identify genre moves. Instead, the researchers often only include a statement
like “an analysis of move patterns was undertaken” or “the macro-structure
of the texts in the corpus was investigated.” (The term macro-structure, by
the way, is another way to describe the move patterns in a text.) Some
authors, however, have offered details of their move analysis processes—
useful information for beginning genre analysts. Swales (2011/1981), for
example, notes that he made his initial CARS moves discoveries by applying
to his collection of RA introductions “a system of neutral color-coding using
a range of marker pens” (p. 21), likely with a different color used for each
move. Ding (2007) also tells us that, after her initial move coding of ‘personal
statements’, a genre often required of applications to academic programs,
she re-coded her texts five months later (a good strategy for bringing a fresh
perspective to one’s analysis).
A more systematic description of move analysis how-tos has been offered
by Upton and Cohen (2009). Drawing on Biber, Connor, and Upton’s
(2007a) moves analysis framework, Upton and Cohen propose a multi-stage,
recursive process for identifying and describing moves. They illustrate how
this approach worked in their analysis of a very interesting genre—that of
‘birthmother letters’, texts written to expectant mothers by couples wishing
to adopt the birthmothers’ babies. Their corpus, based on Cohen’s (2007)
original study, consisted of 46 texts: 20 ‘successful letters’, which resulted in
consent by the first or second birthmother to whom they were sent, and 26
‘unsuccessful letters’, sent out at least 15 times before the authoring couples
were selected by a birthmother (p. 590). Although this is not a typical ESP
 Analyzing genre moves 31

genre, it illustrates in a clear, accessible fashion the concept of moves as

functional units; and, given the rhetorical delicacies of asking for someone’s
child, it usefully demonstrates how moves work together to achieve parti-
cular communicative purposes. In Task 2.1 below, you get a chance to think
about the moves in this interesting genre.

Task 2.1 Moves in a birthmother letter

Read through the following excerpts from a successful birthmother letter in
Upton and Cohen’s (2009) study and then answer the questions that follow.

Dear Expectant Mother:

We are Joe and Barbara. It is hard to put into words what we really want
to express to you. We want you to know who we really are, what we
think, and how we feel from our hearts …
We wanted you to hear both of our voices in this letter. We thought
it would be fun to use italics when I (Barbara) am speaking, and regular
type when it’s me (Joe). There will be times when we both want to say
the same thing, so when it appears in bold black type, we’re both talking
to you … [Note: The italics, regular type, and boldface were not indi-
cated in Upton and Cohen’s (2009) analysis, but in the excerpted
portions below it is still generally clear which member of the couple is
speaking when.]
[…]
Like most families today, Joe and I both work. I’m lucky to have a job
that I enjoy, and a boss that understands how important it is to spend time
with your children. I work as a dental assistant with advanced skills and
responsibilities. I am home most days between noon and 2:00 pm, so that
leaves a lot of time to spend with baby. I still work for the same Con-
struction Company as a union bricklayer. I have good benefits, a nice
income and I enjoy what I do. I take pride in my work.
[…]
As we stated earlier, summer is our favorite season … . We take great
pleasure in sitting on the porch swing, on warm summer nights, and lis-
tening to the frogs and crickets sing. On hot days we take Jack (our dog) to
my grandparents[’] pool to cool off and visit with the family. There are
always kids (big and little) splashing around and having fun.
[…]
We have a very extensive family consisting of grandparents, parents,
uncles, aunts, and cousins. The whole family welcomes the opportunity of
giving their love and support to a new child.
[…]
32 ESP genre analysis

I’m one of the luckiest ones to have found my soul mate on the first try.
I knew I loved Joe after our first date, and I wanted to marry him on our
second. Joe is the kind of person you strive to become close to. He has an
honest, forthcoming feel about him.
[…]
We want to thank you for taking the time to learn a little bit about us.
We would very much like to talk to you in person. You can reach us
through our toll free number at … . Please know that if you call, no one
will try to pressure or influence you in any way. We want to provide you
with as much information as possible.
We wish you and your child the best,
[Signatures]
(Excerpts taken from Upton & Cohen, 2009,
Appendix 2, pp. 602–603)

1 What moves do you notice in these excerpts? To answer this question,

think about what the writers (a couple named Barbara and Joe) are doing in
particular sections of the text.
2 How do these moves together help to achieve the ultimate purpose of
convincing the birthmother to let Barbara and Joe adopt her child?
3 The birthmother letters in Upton and Cohen’s study, including the one
above, were all written by white, middle-class, heterosexual couples. How
might the moves in birthmother letters in a different cultural community
(perhaps one you are familiar with) be similar to or different from the
moves in this letter?

Now that you have a feeling from the task above of what it is like to look
for moves in a text, we can consider the formal process for doing so that
Upton and Cohen (2009) describe. I have outlined eight stages of this process
below, changing some of Upton and Cohen’s original stage labels in order to
consolidate some sub-stages, and including a few additional thoughts of my
own. This eight-stage process is quite useful for a detailed moves analysis
study, although, as I suggest below, it can also be simplified for other
purposes.

1 Collect a set of texts to analyze. You will need to gather a set of texts
from a particular genre to analyze. Upton and Cohen (2009) suggest
that the larger the sample, the more you will be able to generalize with
confidence your findings to other texts of this same genre. If you are
new to moves analysis, however, it is also okay to start out with a few
texts (even just one or two) to make discoveries about possible moves in
the genre. The sample texts that you collect constitute the corpus for
your analysis.
 Analyzing genre moves 33

2 Get an initial sense of the texts, their genre, and the genre’s pur-
poses. Before launching into segmenting the texts into moves, it is
useful first to gain an understanding of the larger purpose(s) of the
whole genre to which these texts belong. That way you can better
identify moves that contribute to that/those larger purpose(s). As
discussed in Chapter 1, it may not be possible to pinpoint all of the
purposes of the genre at the beginning of your analysis, but go ahead
and jot down your initial impressions about the texts’ genre and
purposes.
3 Gather your first impressions of the texts’ moves and steps. You
should now take a first pass at identifying moves in the texts.
First, read through your texts once in an informal way to get a feel
for them and their patterns; and then read through the texts once
again, this time marking moves that you see via the following
process:
 Marking and labeling moves. Wherever you observe a segment of
a text performing a clear or interesting function, highlight that
segment and write a note next to it briefly describing its
purpose. For example, if you are analyzing film review texts,
you might notice a certain part of the text gives a plot sum-
mary. Write ‘plot summary’ or ‘summarizing plot’ next to that
section. As you are doing your move labeling, you may already
start thinking about how these moves serve the larger overall
functions of the text’s genre, which you considered in Stage 1 of
this process.
 Marking and labeling steps. If you see sub-parts to the moves,
mark those as possible ‘steps’ within the moves. For example,
within the plot summary move, you may notice that film reviewers
perform such steps as ‘describing the setting’ and ‘noting a con-
flict’. One thing to keep in mind is that not all moves analyses
need to go to the level of steps. And if you are a moves analysis
beginner, it is fine just to stick to moves for now and skip the
internal steps.
 Do not worry about being perfect. At this early stage of your moves
analysis, do not worry about getting the moves and steps ‘right’. As
Upton and Cohen (2009) note, “Multiple readings and reflections
on the texts are needed before clear move types, with their defining
function(s), emerge” (p. 591).
4 Establish a working set of moves (and steps) categories. Read back
through the move (and possibly step) labels you marked in your
texts on your first read through and list them on a piece of paper.
Look at your list and see if there are any move or step categories
you wish to revise; perhaps where you notice overlaps, you can
34 ESP genre analysis

combine categories, or, conversely, split a category where differ-

entiations are needed; alternatively, you may wish to rename some of
your categories to better capture their functions. Make the revisions
needed to your list of move/step categories. You now have a working
set of categories for again marking—that is, coding—the moves and
steps in your texts.
5 Pilot code the moves and refine the categories as needed. Go through a
few of your texts again and code their moves/steps once more, using
your list of working moves and steps developed above in Stage 4. This
is your ‘pilot-coding’ stage to see how well your move/step categories
work to capture the functions of different parts of your text. Try to
segment each of your small sample of texts into moves/steps. In other
words, there should not be any stranded chunks of text that are unla-
beled. If you are really not sure what move a text portion belongs to,
label it ‘unknown’. Take notes on how you want to further revise your
categories, if at all. Upton and Cohen (2009) also recommend that for
each of your move/step categories you write a clear definition of it and
have a representative example, which you can refer back to as you code
the rest of your texts in the next stage.
6 Code the moves/steps in your full set of texts. Using the revised
move/step categories you have developed so far, code your full set of
texts for their moves and, if applicable, steps. Do not be surprised if
you discover “additional steps or even move types” through this
process (Upton & Cohen, 2009, p. 594); these discoveries will help
you refine your move/step categories further so that they better
capture the functional units in the genre you are studying. Upton and
Cohen also recommend at this stage asking a colleague to code the
full set of texts and then checking your inter-rater reliability, i.e., the
degree of agreement on the coding of your moves/steps. You can
then discuss any discrepancies and adjust your coding of the texts
accordingly.
7 Note patterns in move/step frequency and organization/sequencing.
After coding all of your texts, you may have noticed that some moves/
steps occur more frequently than others. Calculate the frequency of
occurrence of the various moves/steps and note which ones seem to be
more obligatory, or core, and which ones more optional. Also make
note of patterns in the order in which the moves occur. For example, do
certain moves tend to occur in a particular place in the text? Do some
moves tend to appear before or after other moves? How much variation
is there in the move sequencing?
8 Analyze linguistic features of the moves. Upton and Cohen (2009),
drawing on Biber, Connor and Upton (2007a), recommend analyzing
the lexical and grammatical features of the various move types, pre-
ferably using corpus linguistics analysis software if you have a large set
 Analyzing genre moves 35

of texts. We will discuss processes of lexicogrammatical feature analysis

in Chapter 3.

Simplified moves analysis process

After reading through the stages above, you may have concluded that moves
analysis is a lot of work. Well, it definitely can be but need not always be.
The very detailed process above, for instance, might be appropriate if you were
undertaking a formal moves study for publication or developing comprehensive
teaching materials on a genre. The process could be considerably scaled down,
however, if you just wanted a preliminary sense of a genre’s moves, perhaps for
an informal research study or for an initial moves lesson in an ESP class. In
such cases, instead of going through the recursive stages of developing, piloting
and refining move categories, you could make relatively quick move observa-
tions, which you and your ESP students would discuss and try out on addi-
tional texts they find for homework. In other words, the thoroughness of your
moves analysis could be adjusted depending on your purposes.

Task 2.2 Practice with moves analysis stages

1 Select a genre related to your research or teaching interests.
2 For this genre, go through several of the eight moves analysis stages above,
deciding on which stages to pursue or not depending on your interests. At
the very least, you will need to do Stage 1, and a few others.
3 Write a brief reflection on what this moves analysis experience was like
for you.

Analyzing moves in spoken genres

Although there have been fewer ESP studies of spoken genres than of written
genres, spoken moves analysis is nevertheless important, given that many of
the genres that ESP students need to understand are spoken, including lec-
tures, office hour interactions, business meetings, grocery store exchanges, TV
news programs, and others. Analyzing moves in these oral texts often involves
some additional stages that you can add to our eight-stage process above:

 Recording and transcribing the spoken texts that you will analyze.
 If it is an interactive spoken genre (e.g., a meeting or discussion of some
kind), analyzing the moves of all of the participants contributing to the
text.

Two published investigations illustrate possible processes and pro-

ducts of spoken move analysis—one of academic lecture introductions
36 ESP genre analysis

(Thompson, 1994) and the other of bargaining in a marketplace (Orr,

2007).

Academic lecture introductions

In many university courses, lectures remain a key genre by which students are
expected to learn class content. ESP students, however, often have difficulty
comprehending lectures, particularly if the lecturer does not provide exten-
sive written aids such as handouts or slides for following their real-time
spoken delivery. In order to develop teaching materials for helping ESP students
with lecture listening and comprehension, Thompson (1994) examined moves
in academic lecture introductions, which she said provide “an interpretive
framework for the audience to use as they listen to the rest of the lecture”
(pp. 174–175). She collected 18 lecture introductions from various disciplines
and coded their moves. Thompson also asked a second rater to analyze a
sample of the lecture transcripts, and then made adjustments to her codes
accordingly. From her analysis, Thompson found that lecture introductions
contain two major moves and sets of steps (or what she called “functions” and
“subfunctions”) to orient the listening audience to the focus, format, and
importance of the lecture content: setting up the lecture framework (through
announcing the topic, structure, and aims of the lecture) and putting the topic
in context (through showing the relevance of the topic and relating the topic to
earlier lectures), as listed below (Thompson, 1994, pp. 176, 178).

Function: Set up lecture framework

Sub-function: Announce topic, e.g., what I’m going to do in this section is
Sub-function: Indicate scope, e.g., I’m not going to dwell very long on this
side of things
Sub-function: Outline structure, e.g., I move on to
Sub-function: Present aims, e.g., I want to talk a bit about the problems of
measurement because

Function: Putting topic in context

Sub-function: Show importance/relevance of topic e.g., the implications of
this are enormous
Sub-function: Relate ‘new’ to ‘given’, e.g., we’ve all seen slides like this
before
Sub-function: Refer to earlier lectures, e.g., if you cast your mind back to
Friday and the lecture I gave

Thompson argued that teaching students to listen for these introductory

moves and steps could help them predict and follow the rest of the lecture’s
content. See if you agree with Thompson after doing Task 2.3.
 Analyzing genre moves 37

Task 2.3 Listening for moves in a lecture introduction

Listen to the introduction (the first 3 minutes, 26 seconds) of the following
psychology lecture on language given at Yale University: http://oyc.yale.edu/p
sychology/psyc-110/lecture-6. As you listen, keep Thompson’s functions and
sub-functions (i.e., moves and steps) above in mind, and then answer the following
questions:

1 Which of Thompson’s lecture introduction moves and steps do you hear

the psychology professor use? What order do you notice that these moves
and steps occurred in?
2 Based on the introduction, what do you predict about the structure and
content of the rest of the lecture?
3 Do you think that having attended to these introductory moves you would
better recognize and comprehend key points in the rest of the lecture?
Why or why not?

Thompson’s study also illustrates another aspect of moves analysis: its

potential to reveal variability in a genre’s moves. Specifically, she found that
the 18 lectures from her study did not exhibit a consistent ordering of func-
tions and sub-functions. For example, while one lecture might begin by out-
lining the structure of a lecture and then indicating its scope, another would
first announce the topic, present the lecture aims and connect to previous
lectures before outlining the structure. Indeed, in Task 2.3, you may have
noticed that the psychology lecturer used several of Thompson’s moves but
not in the order she listed in her model. This variation, Thompson observes,
may be in part because spoken genres, such as lectures, are not as planned
and revised as most written genres and are thus subject to the speaker’s
“spontaneous decisions about ‘what to put where’” (p. 181). Lecturers may also
switch up their planned order depending on what they perceive the audience
needs at that moment. As you analyze the moves in spoken genres, there-
fore, keep in mind that you may find less constancy in their move structures.

Bargaining moves in a Chinese street market

Interactive spoken genres may be particularly unpredictable, given that par-
ticipants are each making their own moves choices in the interaction. In her
study of bargaining in Chinese street markets, Orr (2007), for example,
describes various move patterns in customer (C) and salesperson (S) nego-
tiations over an item’s price. The example price negotiation below (from
Orr, 2007, p. 79) shows one type of offer–counteroffer–acceptance moves
sequence. (The numbers in the Cantonese transcription indicate tones, and
the English translation is in single quotations.)
38 ESP genre analysis

1. C: (Pointing to a kettle) Ni l go3 gei2 cin4 aa1?

‘How much is this?’
2. S: Jaa6 man1.
‘Twenty dollars.’
3. C: (Picks up the kettle and examines it) Sap6 ng5 man1 laa1.
‘Fifteen dollars.’
4. S: Hou2 laa1.
‘Okay.’
5. (S puts kettle in a bag. C pays and leaves)
As the next example demonstrates (from Orr, 2007, p. 82), however, salespersons
do not always respond to the customer’s counteroffer with an acceptance move.
1. C: (Points at some bamboo trivets) Gei2 cin4 aa1?
‘How much are these?’
2. S: Ng5 man1 go3
‘Five dollars each.’
3. C: Sei3 man1 laa1. Dak1 laa1. (Opens up purse to take out some money)
‘Make it four dollars. Okay.’
4. S: Hou2 peng4 gaa3 laa3. Mou5 zaan6 nei5 gaa3 laa3.
‘It’s already very cheap. I’m not making any money off of you.’
5. C: (Picks two trivets up) Naa4. (Hands the trivets and ten dollars to S)
‘Here.’
6. S: (Puts the trivets in a plastic bag and hands it back to C).
Badarneh, Al-Momani, and Migdadi (2016) have also examined bargaining
interactions in women’s clothing stores in Jordan, paying particular attention
to salesmen’s and female customers’ uses of mock conflict talk, sociability
talk, and flirtation talk.
In academic contexts as well, interactive genres can have variable move
patterns, as Basturkmen (1999) found to be the case with MBA seminar
discussions, where students’ moves for questioning their peers had wide-
ranging structures, and varied in how polite or challenging they were.

Seeking input from specialist informants

Sometimes in studying a genre’s moves it is helpful to get the input of
specialist informants, that is, members of the community that actually uses
the genre. Although an ESP researcher may be expert at identifying textual
moves, a specialist informant may understand better how those moves come
across to ‘real’ readers or listeners in the community, which moves are most
important to these audiences and why, and how well these moves are
working in particular instances of the genre.
Specialist informants have offered insights into a number of genres, including
personal statements, a genre that individuals often perform when applying to
 Analyzing genre moves 39

academic or professional programs (Chiu, 2016). Personal statements are chal-

lenging to write, requiring applicants to skillfully frame their individual histories,
achievements, and/or interests in terms of the values of the program to which
they are seeking entrance. Given that few models of successful personal state-
ments are publically available (Samraj & Monk, 2008) and that the stakes of
writing a poor one are high (e.g., possible rejection from the program), several
researchers have sought to uncover valued moves in this genre, using a combi-
nation of textual move analysis and specialist informant commentary (Barton,
Ariail, & Smith, 2004; Brown, 2004; Samraj & Monk, 2008). Samraj and Monk
(2008), for example, interviewed faculty reading personal statements for master’s
program applications about their “priorities” when “read[ing] statements from
applicants” (p. 210); they also presented these reviewers with authentic personal
statements written for their particular programs and asked them to evaluate the
statements’ content, organization, and language. The informant input revealed
move preferences particular to certain fields and programs. A linguistics program
informant, for instance, spoke favorably of an applicant’s description of his/her
language teaching experience, while an electrical engineering informant particu-
larly liked another applicant’s comments about his interest in sports and volun-
teer work with earthquake victims, which, the informant said helped him to get
the know the applicant “as a well-rounded person” and spoke to the program’s
interests in “leadership” and “team involvement” (p. 207). The MBA program
informant, on the other hand, affirmed that for their program it was important
that a personal statement address what the applicant is still “lacking” and “why
[they are] going back to graduate school” (p. 204).
In a similar study, Barton, Ariail, and Smith (2004) used a technique
known as a think-aloud with their specialist informants, reviewers of appli-
cations to U.S. medical residency programs. Specifically, they asked resi-
dency selection committees members to verbalize their reactions while they
read applicants’ personal statements in real time. The informants’ responses
revealed that the statements’ opening moves, in which the applicants explain
their decision to enter medicine and/or tell a story from their personal
experience, were important in shaping evaluators’ judgments about the can-
didate. Task 2.4 gives you a chance to reflect on the informants’ think-aloud
reactions to two different applicants’ opening moves.

Task 2.4 Informants’ views of moves in medical residency

personal statements
In the chart below, Column A includes opening moves from two medical resi-
dency personal statements in Barton, Ariail, and Smith (2004). Column B shows
the think-aloud responses of two surgery residency selection committee members
to these moves. The same two committee members commented on each of the
two applicants’ moves. Read the material in both columns and then answer the
questions below.
Column A: Two sample opening moves Column B: Residency selection committee
members’ think-aloud reactions
Two of my patients died today, while “I am not impressed”
two of my patients who were about to “My response is not strong”
die were given a second chance at life. “stilted, too formal”
The deaths were not unexpected, for “attempt at philosophy”
even before our paths had crossed, these “This personal statement gives no
individuals had ceased to exist in any sort experiences that set the candidate
of meaningful way. It is those who have apart”
been afforded the chance to greet
another tomorrow who are, in my mind,
nothing short of a miracle. You see, I am
currently participating in a rotation in
transplantation surgery. The last 24 hours
of my education have been marked by
the incomparable poignancy of witnessing
two human beings exit this world, as well
as the unbound joy and hopefulness of
seeing the organs of these deceased
individuals provide the gift of life to two
once terminally ill patients. It is this
specialty’s phenomenal melding of intri-
cate surgical procedures and extensive
medical knowledge that propels me
toward the study of surgical medicine.
After transferring to the University of “I am really interested. He has me
Virginia to begin my third year of college, hooked”
I decided to join the track team as a “That is a good start, sort of concrete
javelin thrower. Despite the fact that I and starts to tell a story”
had never thrown a javelin in my life, I “Now that’s a very clever use of a per-
was given a trial period by the coaching sonal story to really blow your trumpet
staff. I showed up for practice day after without blowing your trumpet”
day, arriving early and staying late, trying “exactly the stuff you need in order to
my hardest and making improvements in be a good surgeon”
areas in which I was deficient. None- “We like people who profess not to be
theless, I was expecting each practice to afraid of hard work”
be told that I was not good enough to “The first paragraph is helpful in that
remain on the team. But that never that would separate him from other
happened. At the end of the semester, candidates”
the coach took me aside and apologized
for not speaking to me earlier. He
explained that I had no natural talent and
would never be a competitive thrower,
especially starting so late in my eligibility.
But he also explained that he did not cut
me because I made the rest of the team
better. He stated that my infectious
enthusiasm, work ethic, dedication, and
persistent sense of humor pushed
everyone around me to excel.

Source: Material excerpted from Barton, Ariail, and Smith, 2004, pp. 103–106, and organized
into chart format.
 Analyzing genre moves 41

1 What do the informants’ responses reveal about successful opening move

elements for these medical residency personal statements?
2 What surprises you, if anything, about the informants’ reactions?
3 Can you imagine incorporating specialist informant responses to other
genres in an ESP course you are teaching? If so, how?

Cross-cultural moves comparisons

In addition to consulting specialist informants, one can integrate other
dimensions into a moves analysis. Some ESP researchers, for example, have
taken a cross-cultural approach and compared a single genre’s moves
across different cultural contexts. Such comparisons are particularly useful
for illuminating variability in move forms and functions. These cross-
cultural moves analyses may be across two or more national or ethnic
contexts, or what Holliday (1999) has called large cultures, while others
may focus on narrower communities, or small cultures (Holliday), that
exist within and across large cultures. By these terms, Samraj and Monk’s
(2008) analysis of personal statements in three academic programs would
be a small-culture comparison. A study comparing personal statements in
Korea and the U.S., on the other hand, would be large-culture in orientation.
For ESP researchers and teachers, both types of comparisons may reveal a
range of move possibilities for a particular genre. This section illustrates
how such comparisons may be done at both large-culture and small-culture
level.

Moves comparisons across ‘large’ cultures

A number of studies have compared genre moves across national cultures,
focusing on such genres as letters of recommendation in the U.K., the U.S.,
and Germany (Precht, 1998), PhD defenses and vivas in Sweden and the U.S.
(Mezek & Swales, 2016), RA abstracts in the U.S. and Iran (Friginal &
Mustafa, 2017), and newspaper editorials in Mexico, the U.S., and Spain
(Pak & Acevedo, 2008). This work has straddled the interests of ESP and of
Contrastive Rhetoric, also known as Intercultural Rhetoric, a field con-
cerned with discourse patterns across cultures of various types (Connor,
2011; Connor & Rozycki, 2013).
Vergaro’s (2002) study of Italian and British ‘money-chasing letters’ is
one such example of a contrastive, large-culture analysis of moves varia-
tion. Through studying the discourse patterns of 47 letters that Italian and
British companies sent to customers delinquent on their payments, Vergaro
found that this genre shared common moves in both Italy and Britain.
These moves included Subject (of the Letter), Address the Issue, Solicit
Payment, Warn or State Consequences, End Politely, and Closing
42 ESP genre analysis

Salutation. Differences across the two letter sets, however, were also evi-
dent and contributed to very distinct tones in the letters. The British letters
contained an Express Availability move that offered assistance to the cus-
tomer, thus softening the payment solicitation and creating a sense of
solidarity with the customer, as illustrated in the British letter excerpts
below.

We request you to settle the account in the next 7 days.

If there is any particular reason why payment has not been made, and
this may include your company’s financial policy, we will gladly assist if
it is possible for us to do so, but, in that event, please do notify us
immediately by telephone or fax.
(from Vergaro, 2002, p. 1221)

This polite Express Availability move was absent in the Italian letters,
consistent with their overall more distant and direct tone. All of the Italian
letters, in fact, opened immediately with an Address the Issue move,
without any preceding salutation, as illustrated in one letter’s opening
below:

Riesaminando la Vs. partita contabile rileviamo che risultano tuttora

scoperti, salvo pagamenti in corso, i documenti riportati in allegato.
(Upon examining the balance of your account we notice that,
unless payment has been recently made, the enclosed items remain
unpaid)
(from Vergaro, 2002, p. 1217)

Vergaro withholds judgment on whether the British or Italian letter moves

are more effective, stating that “as in food tastes, each style is appropriate
within a given culture” (p. 1223). For the purposes of collecting money, she
suggests that “[a]n Italian style letter apparently works best with Italians,
although it would appear terse and bureaucratic to an English reader, and an
English style letter apparently works best in England, although it would
appear strangely solicitous and probably hypocritical to an Italian” (p. 1223).
For ESP practitioners and their students, then, a possible take-away from
this and other large-culture moves studies is that “being aware of similarities
and differences in the writing practices of particular cultures, i.e. adopting a
contrastive stance, will help students learn to write effectively for a given
audience” (p. 1212).

Moves comparisons across ‘small’ cultures

Other genre investigations have compared genre moves across small cultures,
described by Holliday (1999) as “any cohesive social grouping” that is
 Analyzing genre moves 43

characterized by “a discernible set of behaviours and understandings con-

nected with group cohesion” (pp. 237, 248)—a similar concept to that of
discourse community discussed in Chapter 1. Under this definition, a work-
place, an academic discipline, a religious organization, or even an individual
classroom of students could be considered a small culture, as its members
engage in particular actions (such as creating products, conducting research,
completing class assignments, and so on) that connect members to each
other. Holliday argues that small-culture investigations are more revealing
than large-culture studies. While the latter often reduce national or ethnic
cultures to stereotyped differences, or “pre-defined characteristics” (p. 245),
a small-culture analysis, says Holliday, does not assume that differentiating
characteristics of the culture(s) already exist but rather explores whatever
behaviors actual occur in the group(s) being examined: “Small culture is …
more to do with activities taking place within a group than with the nature
of the group itself” (p. 250).
In the rest of this section, I illustrate some approaches to small-culture
comparisons of genre moves, through three studies: one on RAs in two
academic disciplines, another on non-traditional student theses, and a third
on legal opinion writing by law students and expert barristers.

RA introduction moves in two fields

Samraj (2002) was one of the first to compare RA introductions across
two academic fields, a type of small-culture study that has since become
frequent in ESP genre research. She specifically contrasted introductory RA
moves from two related environmental science disciplines—Wildlife
Behavior and Conservation Biology—and found that even between these
two connected fields, there existed move differences that pointed to dis-
tinctions in the disciplines’ interests and concerns. In Move 1 (Establishing
a Territory), for example, Samraj found that the Wildlife Behavior and
Conservation Biology RA authors made different sorts of “centrality
claims” about the importance of their research areas (p. 5). Task 2.5 asks
you to compare these claims and what they say about the two disciplinary
cultures.

Task 2.5 Small culture influences on research article

introduction moves
The chart below includes excerpts illustrating the claiming centrality step of
Move 1 from two RA introductions in Samraj’s (2002) study. Excerpt A is
from a Wildlife Behavior (WB) RA, while Excerpt B is from a Conservation
Biology (CB) RA. Read these two excerpts and consider the questions
below.
44 ESP genre analysis

Excerpt A: Wildlife Behavior RA Move 1 Excerpt B: Conservation Biology RA

Move 1
Since the results of Burley (1981, 1985, Tropical-forest nature reserves are
1986) and Burley et al. (1982) on the experiencing mounting human
effects of colour bands on mate choice, encroachment, raising concerns over
reproductive success, and survival in their future viability even in remote
zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, there areas. Long-term maintenance of
have been a number of studies on birds nature reserves in economically
both in captivity and the wild marginal areas of the tropics is
attempting to evaluate the impact of particularly problematical because
colour bands. Results have varied, protection is based on severely
some showing no effects of colour restricted funding from politically and
bands (e.g., Watt 1982; Ratcliff & Boag, administratively weak governments.
1987; Beletsky & Orians, 1989) and Many tropical forest reserves
others demonstrating effects (Brodsky, consequently operate on skeletal
1988; Hagan & Reed, 1988; Metz & budgets, are chronically understaffed,
Weatherhead, 1991). lack the most basic infrastructure,
and cannot count on effective
institutional support to enforce
conservation legislation. Such frailties
render reserves susceptible to a wide
range of illegal activities—hunting,
fishing, logging, mining, land clearing—
carried out by both individuals and
corporations. Worse, the frequent
inability of guards, who are often
unarmed and lacking authority to
make arrests, to prosecute violators
leads to a general disregard of reserve
boundaries and regulations.
Source: The excerpts are from examples in Samraj, 2002, pp. 4–5, organized into chart
format for the purposes of this comparison task.

1 Regarding these Move 1 centrality claims, what differences do you notice in

how WB and CB authors emphasize the importance (i.e., centrality) of their
research topics? In answering this question, consider Samraj’s observation
that CB RA introductions express their studies’ centrality “more in terms of
the phenomenal world than the epistemic world” (Samraj, 2002, p. 5).
2 Samraj (2002) shares with us the following information about Wildlife
Behavior (WB) and Conservation Biology (CB) as disciplines:
 WB is a long-established discipline whereas CB is a relatively new field.
 Compared to WB, CB is more interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such
as resource economics and policy, ecology, and environmental ethics.
 WB is a theoretical, more traditional academic field, while CB is an
applied field, with a focus on finding solutions to real-world conservation
problems.
 CB has been described as a crisis discipline.
 Analyzing genre moves 45

How might one or more of these distinctions in the history and activities of
CB and WB as small cultures help to explain the different Move 1 RA strategies
seen in the excerpts above?

Doctoral theses in the visual and performing arts

Small-culture studies can also involve comparing what is already known about
a genre’s moves in certain community contexts with new discoveries about
these moves in other communities. Such an approach was taken by Paltridge
et al. (2012), who contrasted previous findings about doctoral thesis moves
with patterns they observed in 36 visual and performing arts theses produced
by Australian university doctoral students. About half of these visual and
performing arts theses departed from the conventional dissertation macro-
structure of introduction-method-results-discussion, and instead had a looser
“topic-based” form, whereby each chapter addressed particular topics relevant
to the students’ project (p. 337). Moreover, within these chapters, students
performed thesis-type moves in non-traditional ways. Consider, for instance,
the following excerpts from the introductory chapter of a painting doctoral
thesis, in which the student author unconventionally contextualized her paint-
ing project (a sort of Move 1) by narrating experiences in her mother’s garden.

My mother’s garden in Dianella has a lemon tree at the edge of the back
patio … My father started this garden but he died a year after we
moved in … I have a habit of sitting on the back step … Enclosure and
connection are important senses I relate to in both the works and in the
photographs … The invisible thing I want from gardens has not been
constant … Through the journey of this doctoral project I began to see,
or desire, differently … it is difficult to write about such things in a
doctoral exegesis …
(Excerpts from student’s thesis introduction,
quoted in Paltridge et al., 2012, p. 340)

Compared to traditional dissertation introductions in other disciplines,

this art student’s moves seem atypical. Indeed, even the student suggests that
the conventional “doctoral exegesis” genre is not well suited for what she
wants to express about her project. Yet, as Paltridge et al. argue and as their
comparison to previous thesis research reveals, much thesis move variation
is allowed in visual and performing arts doctoral theses. That is, for stu-
dents in these disciplinary (small) cultures, “there are multiple and valid
options for presenting their work, and … it does not necessarily have to fit a
pre-conceived template, or indeed ‘straight-jacket’, for this kind of writing”
(Paltridge et al, 2012, p. 342).
46 ESP genre analysis

Legal opinions in academic and professional communities

Genre moves can also be compared between academic and professional small
cultures within the same general field. In the area of law, for example,
differences have been observed between legal opinions written by law students
and by working attorneys. The version of the opinion genre taught in law
schools is sometimes called the legal problem-question-answer and involves a
response to a legal case in which law students are asked to “identify legally
material facts in the simulated situation, describe and interpret applicable law,
and through a process of ‘legal reasoning’ reach a decision about the likely
legal outcome of the dispute” (Hafner, 2013, p. 132). This format has also
been described in terms of a four-move pattern known in British-influenced
common law and U.S. law schools by the acronym IRAC, or Issue, Rule,
Application, and Conclusion (Bhatia, Langton, & Lung, 2004; Tessuto, 2011).
The IRAC move pattern is explained well by Professor Eugene Kim of the
University of San Francisco School of Law in his YouTube video www.you
tube.com/watch?v=qNW31cLKcLU. Before watching the video, you can read
through the sample opinion text that Kim provides and listen to his explanation
of this text’s IRAC moves (Figure 2.3).
In the culture of professional law, Hafner (2013) found that the genre
of barrister’s opinion has somewhat similar moves to that of legal

Figure 2.3 “IRAC with cases—sample memo” (screenshot)

Source: Eugene Kim, YouTube (29 Aug. 2013). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qNW31cLKcLU.
 Analyzing genre moves 47

problem-question-answer but are approached differently by barristers (a

type of lawyer) than by students. In his comparison of opinions written by
seasoned barristers and by new law school graduates on the same cases,
Hafner observed that barristers used considerably fewer words than did the
graduates in describing the applicable law (or, in IRAC terms, the Rule
move), possibly due to the fact that with their greater experience, the bar-
risters were more oriented to the case facts than to referencing the law to
bolster their authority. Also, because the barrister’s opinion is primarily a
lawyer-to-lawyer genre, it may not require extensive law explanations. In
contrast, the recent law school graduates may have still been in the academic
mindset of displaying their knowledge in detailed law moves (Hafner, 2013).
Hafner concludes that for novice lawyers “the process of developing pro-
fessional expertise means going beyond the role of legal expert to take on
the roles of fact finder and practical adviser” (p. 141). Extrapolating this
idea more generally, it seems that transitioning between even closely related
small cultures often requires writers or speakers to adjust their previous
moves knowledge and their orientations to performing these moves for
relevant audiences.

Considering large-culture and small-culture influences

It is also possible to consider the simultaneous interplay between large- and
small-culture influences on genre and their moves, or what Atkinson (2004)
has called the complex “interactions of different cultural forces” (p. 286).
Ahmad (1997) addressed such intersecting forces in her study of RA intro-
duction moves in Malaysian journal articles. She found that the Malaysian
article authors frequently omitted Move 2, the Establishing a Niche move
where authors often point out a gap in previous research (Swales, 1990).
And when the Malaysian authors did include a Move 2, it rarely mentioned
weaknesses of other researchers’ studies. Although not specifically referring to
small and large culture, Ahmad suggests that this pattern may be due to the
dynamics among academic researchers in science and engineering (small
culture) specifically in Malaysia (large culture). In particular, she argues that
because this Malaysian academic community is relatively few in membership
and the possible needed research activities vast, “Malay research article writers
do not feel the pressure of competing for a research space, especially when
writing for a small local readership audience in Malay” (Ahmad, 1997,
pp. 296–297). Fredrickson and Swales (1994) similarly found an absence of
competitive Move 2s in RA introductions written for a Swedish linguistics
journal, which they also attributed to the relatively limited size of the Swedish
linguistics research community (again, a combination of large culture and
small culture). Indeed, rather than focusing on carving out a research space,
these Swedish linguists were most concerned with making their introductions
as engaging as possible, given their limited number of readers!
48 ESP genre analysis

Using and revising existing move models

In doing a moves analysis, you may also wish to begin with a previous set of
moves identified for the genre you are interested in (or a closely related genre),
and adjust them as needed to fit the texts in your study. For example, some
have applied Swales’ CARS model to their own corpora of RA introductions
and proposed revisions to its moves and steps (e.g., Samraj, 2002; Swales,
2004). Similarly, in comparing lecture introductions in small and large uni-
versity classes, Lee (2009) started with Thompson’s (1994) lecture moves
framework and added another move, warming up, where he observed lecturers
took care of “housekeeping” matters about the course or, especially in smaller
classes, told rapport-building anecdotes and asides (p. 47).

Summary of moves analysis steps

In the box below, I summarize the moves analysis stages we have covered in
this chapter, including consultation with specialist informants and cross-
cultural comparisons.

Possible stages of moves analysis

1 Collect a set of texts of a particular genre to analyze. If you are doing a
cross-cultural moves study, include texts from more than one small and/or
large cultural context.
2 For spoken genres, audio or video record the texts and transcribe them.
3 Read or listen to the texts to get a sense of their genre and of the genre’s
purposes.
4 If desired, consult existing moves frameworks for this genre or similar
genres.
5 Gather your first impressions of the texts’ moves (and steps, if desired), by:

a marking and labeling moves;

b marking and labeling steps;
c not worrying about being perfect.

6 Establish a working set of moves (and, optionally, steps) categories. If you

are using an existing moves framework, feel free to delete, add, or revise
the moves or steps to better capture patterns in your data.
7 Pilot code the moves/steps in a small sample of your texts.
8 Refine the move/step categories as needed.
9 Code the moves/steps in your full set of texts. Optionally, have a colleague
code the texts as well and check your inter-rater reliability.
10 Note patterns in moves/steps frequency and sequencing.
11 Identify linguistic features of the moves (see Chapter 3).
 Analyzing genre moves 49

12 Consult specialist informants about their views on the moves in your texts
and what makes them more or less important or effective.
13 If your data set allows, identify similarities and differences in how the
moves are realized in different small and/or large cultural contexts.

As I emphasized earlier, a researcher or teacher may choose to follow

only some of the moves analysis stages above, depending on their interests
or purposes.

Tying it all together: analyzing moves in a TED Talk

In this concluding section you get to apply what you have learned about
moves analysis to a relatively new genre: the TED Talk. TED Talks are
short (less than 18 minutes), quasi lecture-like presentations that cover a
range of topics in science and technology, arts, politics, business, education,
social justice, and other areas. They are delivered by experts (some famous,
some less so) and are video-recorded at the annual conference for TED, a
non-profit organization whose acronym stands for Technology, Entertain-
ment, and Design; as well as at independently organized ‘TEDx’ events in
countries around the world. This is an influential genre. In the last decade or
so, many of these talks have been posted on the TED website (www.ted.
com/talks), extending their reach well beyond attendees at TED events.
Strikingly, by northern hemisphere fall (autumn) 2012, the TED Talks
website had reached its billionth view (History of TED, n.d.), and every
day, the talks receive approximately 1.5 million views (Gallo, 2014). This
genre has also made a substantial mark on post-secondary education; Sugi-
moto and Thelwall (2013) found that nearly all of the more than 1,000 TED
Talk videos in their study were included in at least one course syllabus
online. Interestingly, the authors also observed that TED Talks received
more general views than they did academic citations, suggesting that they
“have a much greater impact on the public than within the scholarly com-
munity” (p. 671). Part of what has made TED Talks so appealing to general
listenerships is that they are both informative and enjoyable. Partington
(2014) in fact has characterized this genre as “enlightentainment” (p. 144).
For ESP classrooms, TED Talks can also be useful teaching fodder. The
over 2,400 TED Talk videos (as of 2017), cover a wide range of topics rele-
vant to different students’ academic, professional, or personal interests, as
reflected in the titles below of some frequently viewed TED Talks:

 “How to spot a liar” (Speaker: Pamela Meyer)

 “The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology” (Speaker: Pranav
Mistry)
 “The power of introverts” (Speaker: Susan Cain)
50 ESP genre analysis

 “What’s so sexy about math?” (Speaker: Cédric Villani)

 “Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?” (Speaker: Brian
Goldman)

Many TED videos have an accompanying written transcript, which students

can use to enhance and/or to check their listening comprehension. They are
also often excellent models of well-constructed spoken presentations, and, as
such, examining their moves can help ESP students learn how to present
specialized information to non-specialist audiences, a skill they may need in
their target professions.
This final task gives you an opportunity to work through some of this
chapter’s moves analysis stages with the TED Talk genre.

Task 2.6 Move analysis of TED Talks

1 Go to the TED Talks webpage at www.ted.com/talks and select two or
three TED Talks that look interesting to you. To help you with this pro-
cess, you can browse the talks by their subject area or speaker and then
also sort them by most recent or by most viewed.
2 Listen to your selected talks and, optionally, read along in the transcripts if
available.
3 Try applying some of the stages of moves analysis summarized in the box
earlier. At a minimum, do Stages 3 and 5.
4 How challenging was it to identify moves in these TED Talks? How similar
or different were the moves in each of the talks? How much variation do
you think there is across TED Talk moves, and why?

I hope that you have enjoyed this chapter and from it have learned ways
of examining moves in genres relevant to your research or teaching interests.
In the next chapter (Chapter 3) we will consider how to examine the
linguistic elements, also known as lexicogrammatical features, that make up
moves.
Chapter 3

Analyzing lexicogrammatical
features

In the last chapter we examined ways of analyzing genre moves, those

functional text segments that define a genre’s overall, or ‘macro’, shape and
organization. At a more ‘micro’ level, genres can also be examined for their
lexicogrammatical features (Bhatia, 1993), that is, the vocabulary and
grammatical patterns that help to express the genres’ moves. These patterns
may include recurring words, phrases, and parts of speech; tense, aspect,
and voice; and various syntactic constructions. ESP students are often
particularly interested in these features, as they offer them linguistic options
for communicating particular meanings within specific genres and situations.
In order to integrate attention to lexicogrammar in an ESP course, teachers
may first wish to investigate the linguistic features in genres relevant to their
students. This chapter explores some different approaches for doing such
investigations. These include manual approaches, whereby a genre analyst
codes, counts, and interprets lexicogrammatical features ‘by hand’; and
corpus linguistics approaches, which rely, at least in part, on electronic
software and online corpora to uncover linguistic patterns in a set of genre
exemplars. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and you may
decide to use both in a genre analysis. The chapter also illustrates how these
approaches have been applied in ESP studies of ‘linguistic politeness’ in
spoken and written genres. As in the previous chapter, there will be oppor-
tunities for you to practice the analytical techniques covered, which you also
might encourage your students to use as they explore the linguistic features
of new texts on their own.

Methods of lexicogrammatical analysis

Manual approaches
In a manual approach to lexicogrammatical analysis, the genre researcher,
sometimes with little more technology than paper and colored pencils,
follows a similar protocol to that discussed in the previous chapter for
moves analysis: S/he reads or listens to the texts carefully, notices features
52 ESP genre analysis

that seem interesting, develops a scheme for categorizing and coding them,
and then identifies and counts (perhaps with only a calculator) instances of
the focal features in the genre exemplars.
Such an approach was used by Samraj (2013) in her comparative analysis
of source citations in eight graduate student MA theses and eight published
RAs, all in the field of biology. Samraj examined both the forms and
rhetorical functions of the citations in these research genres. For her formal
analysis, she located, through her own close reading of the 16 texts, citations
that were “integral” (i.e., with the source author woven into the sentence)
and “non-integral” (i.e., with the source author cited outside of the sentence
grammar proper) (Samraj, 2013, p. 301), illustrated in the examples below.

1 Integral citation: “Selander (1964) suggested that the ancestral cactus

wren is most closely represented by C. b. affinis of Baja California Sur.”
[from an MA thesis]
2 Non-integral citation: “The presence of hilly terrain between foodplant
patches has been suggested as a factor inhibiting the colonization of new
patches for E. editha bayensis (Harrison, 1989).” [from an MA thesis]
(Examples from Samraj, 2013, p. 304)

Samraj’s investigation revealed that, compared to the RA writers, the

student thesis writers had more frequent use of the integral citation type,
which, Samraj observed, pointed to students’ preference “for granting pro-
minence to individual authors” (p. 303). Similarly, the students, again in
comparison to the published writers, had more frequent use of “verb con-
trolled” integral citations (p. 303), whereby the source author took on the
“agent” role as the subject of the verb in the student’s sentence (as in
example A above) rather than just being “named” in a less prominent position
in the sentence (p. 301). To arrive at these findings, Samraj carefully read the
MA and RA discussion sections and counted and categorized the citations
according to their integral and non-integral forms. This manual approach was
do-able given the relatively modest size of the corpus (16 texts altogether) and
the fact that the citations could be fairly easily spotted in reading through
the texts (Samraj, personal communication, November 20, 2016). Samraj’s
close reading also allowed her to distinguish whether the citations were verb
controlled (functioning as the agent of the verb) or named, as well as to
interpret the various rhetorical functions of the citations within the thesis
and RA discussion sections. These functions were actually the central focus
of her project, which you can read about further in her article.
In another study of graduate students’ source citations, Pecorari (2006)
also used a manual approach, which this time revealed ways that the stu-
dents’ citation language transgressed norms of source use for research
genres. She collected a total of 17 MA theses and PhD dissertations (all
written by non-native English speakers) and 363 source texts used in some
 Lexicogrammatical features 53

way by the students in their texts (with or without acknowledgement). In

instances where students cited a source, Pecorari checked ‘by hand’ to see
whether the students had actually incorporated language and information
from that original source or instead had taken them from another source
(i.e., a secondary source that used the original source). What she found was
quite interesting: The students often used wording and ideas from secondary
sources to present information from the original sources without citing the
secondary sources. Consider, for example, the following two texts from
Pecorari’s study; the first was from a student’s text and the second from the
secondary source text: Datta, Ganesan, and Natarajan (1989); the similar
portions of the passages are italicized.

Student text:
Mannan which is a major constituent of the cell wall in C. albicans,
inhibits a Candida antigen-induced in vitro proliferation of normal
lymphocytes and also blocks the antigen-presenting ability of macro-
phages (Fischer et al., 1982).//In addition, the polysaccharide fractions
from C. albicans stimulate T-cells to produce a suppressor factor,
which inhibits interleukin 1 and interleukin 2 production (Lombardi
et al., 1985).
Source text:
Manna, a major constituent of the cell wall in C. albicans, was detected
in the serum of some patients with mucocutaneous candidiasis (Fischer
et al., 1978). Mannan inhibited a Candida antigen-induced in vitro pro-
liferation of normal lymphocytes and also blocked the antigen-presenting
ability of macrophages (Fischer et al., 1982).//In another study, poly-
saccharide fractions (containing mostly mannose and glucose residues)
from C. albicans stimulated the T-cells to produce a suppressor factor,
which in turn inhibited interleukin 1 and interleukin 2 production
(Lombardi et al., 1985). [Excerpt is from Datta, Ganesan, & Natarajan,
1989, p. 70, which was not acknowledged in student text above.]
(Examples adapted from Pecorari, 2006, p. 15)

It appears, on the surface, that the student has cited sources using
appropriate forms (e.g., Fischer et al. and Lombardi et al.). However, as
Pecorari points out, the close similarities between the student’s text and Datta,
Ganesan, and Natarajan (the secondary source) indicate that the student
incorporated, without citation, these secondary source authors’ synthesis of
Fischer et al. and Lombardi et al., using much of these authors’ language as
well. Pecorari’s manual analysis was particularly useful for revealing this
fact. It allowed Pecorari to observe similarities in language, organization,
and argument between the students’ citation moves and the secondary
54 ESP genre analysis

source passages. Although a computer-based comparison of the texts, using,

for example, a Google search or plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin
would have shown what words were identical across the passages, it would not
have revealed the extent to which the students followed the logical presentation
of the original source material offered by the secondary source (Pecorari,
August 2014, personal communication). This approach therefore allowed
Pecorari to discover students’ “occluded” (i.e., hidden) lexicogrammatical-level
and discourse-level borrowing from secondary sources, which transgressed
research genre norms for source citations. From these findings, Pecorari is
quick to point out that students’ violations might not be intentional but
rather are likely due to the fact that the rules of secondary-source citation
are rarely seen by students in the published articles that they read. That is,
because established researchers do not frequently cite secondary sources
(presumably drawing on the original sources instead, or going back to the
original sources once they had read the secondary sources), the conventions
for doing such citation—or of how to avoid needing it—are invisible to
students, and are thus a needed focus in EAP writing courses when teaching
research genres.

Corpus linguistics approaches

Although, as Samraj’s and Pecorari’s studies suggest, a manual approach can
be very useful depending on what textual elements one is examining and for
what purposes, computer technology can also offer much assistance in
revealing lexicogrammatical genre features, particularly those that we would
not notice on our own. For doing such assisted analyses, ESP researchers have
used tools of corpus linguistics, which, broadly speaking, is an approach to
language study that uses electronically stored collections of spoken and/or
written texts (i.e., corpora, or corpus in the singular) and software that
allow corpora to be searched for a wide variety of features. One advantage of
using computerized corpora and corpus tools for lexicogrammatical analysis is
that they allow you to discover patterns that you would not expect in the texts
you are studying (Baker, 2006; Biber, Connor, & Upton, 2007a). As such, a
corpus-assisted approach can mitigate against researcher biases about the dis-
course being analyzed (Baker, 2006), revealing what words and grammatical
patterns are actually present in examples of a genre, rather than only assumed
to be there. Another clear benefit of corpus tools is that they radically reduce
the amount of time (and tedium) involved in identifying the presence of parti-
cular lexicogrammatical forms. Instead of you counting by hand all of the
nouns in a set of 58 newspaper editorials, for instance, electronic corpus tools
can complete this task in a few seconds and tell you the frequency of each
individual noun and what other words each noun occurs with.
Some corpora are publically available to search online, including “mega-
corpora” (Koester, 2010, p. 45) like the Corpus of Contemporary American
 Lexicogrammatical features 55

English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC), each made up of

millions of words of spoken and written discourse from various genres (e.g.,
news texts, fiction writing, sermons, academic journal articles, lectures, let-
ters, and radio broadcasts). There are also smaller and more narrowly
focused corpora such as the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
(MICASE) comprised of spoken academic genres such as lectures, student
presentations, office hour interactions, and dissertation defenses; the British
Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE) of undergraduate and graduate
student papers of various genres; the British Academic Spoken English
(BASE) Corpus of university seminars and lectures, and the Hong Kong
Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), which includes four sub-corpora of
speech produced in academic, business, conversational, and public settings.
An internet search on any of these corpora names will lead you to the
websites. For a list of several freely available corpora, see Nesi (2013). You
can also purchase corpora or develop your own, as a number of ESP
researchers have done, compiling and scanning texts from such genres as
RA abstracts (Hyland, 2004a); business meetings (Handford, 2010), and
fundraising letters (Connor & Gladkov, 2004).
In an electronic corpus, you can readily search for lexicogrammatical
features with corpus analysis tools. Some of these tools are available on the
websites of the corpora themselves. Others are included in free or for-purchase
software, such as Antconc (Anthony, 2014), or WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2017),
that you can apply to your own corpus of texts. In the sections below, I
describe several time-saving analyses that corpus tools can perform on lexico-
grammatical genre features. (See also descriptions of these and other analyses in
Flowerdew, 2009; Hyland, 2004b; Koester, 2010; Nesi, 2013.)

Word frequency
One of the most common uses of corpus software is the identification of
frequent words in a set of texts. For example, in the freely available Antconc
software (Anthony, 2014), the Word List tool will generate a frequency-
ranked list of all of the words in your corpus. The following (Table 3.1), for
example, is a list this tool created of the 40 most frequent words in three
letters of recommendation I wrote for former graduate students (omitting
the students’ names, department, and classes).
As you will notice, and as is the case in most texts, the most frequent
words are grammatical function words like articles, prepositions, and con-
junctions. A bit further down the list, however, are recurring content words
like teaching, class, completed, exam, position, and recommend. In terms of
the evaluative words in my recommendations, the list reveals that I use well
and excellent multiple times, and further down on the list, not shown here,
insightful, skillfully, asset, and impressed also appear more than once in my
letters. Although these lexical patterns from this very small corpus (three
56 ESP genre analysis

Table 3.1 Most frequent words in a corpus of three letters of recommendation

Frequency rank Number of occurrences word
1 56 and
2 52 in
3 43 the
4 30 of
5 29 a
6 28 his
7 22 he
8 22 to
9 18 for
10 14 as
11 14 I
12 14 on
13 14 with
14 12 an
15 11 teaching
16 10 also
17 10 class
18 10 that
19 10 well
20 9 ESL
21 9 program
22 9 students
23 9 their
24 8 our
25 7 English
26 7 MA
27 7 was
28 6 at
29 6 be
30 6 completed
31 6 exam
32 6 excellent
33 6 has
34 6 him
35 6 is
36 6 language
37 6 my
38 6 one
39 6 position
40 6 recommend

short texts from only one writer) are not representative of the whole
recommendation letter genre, they illustrate the usefulness of what a word
frequency tool can do (and with much larger corpora as well).
If the words in a corpus are coded electronically for their parts of speech,
a process known as tagging, more specified frequency lists can be generated,
such as all of the verbs in the corpus, and so on. COCA is one such tagged
 Lexicogrammatical features 57

corpus. If you wanted to identify the most common adjectives in this list, for
example, you would select “adj.All” from the Part of Speech (POS) menu
and the code [j*] would appear in the search box. When you submit this
search, within a few seconds, you would see a list showing that the top ten
adjectives in this large, mixed-genre corpus of American English are, in this
order, other, new, good, American, great, big, old, high, different, and
national, which might suggest some interesting things about American culture.
COCA also allows a tagged search in specific genres. For example, if you select
“Mag: Religion” for our [*j] adjective search, you will see that the top ten
adjectives in American religious magazines are, in this order, other, Catholic,
new, religious, Christian, good, human, social, spiritual, and American.

Keywords
Besides generating word frequency lists, corpus tools can also identify which
words in your corpus are keywords, that is, words whose frequency is
notably greater in your specific corpus than in a general corpus of the
language, also known as the ‘reference’ corpus (Scott & Tribble, 2006).
Keywords can thus reveal what concepts or values are especially important
in a particular genre and the community that uses it. From just a casual
comparison of the two adjective frequency lists above, for example, it
appears that the words social, human, and Christian might be keywords of
the American religious magazine genre, an observation that could be
checked with a keyword tool. Antconc allows you to load a reference corpus
and a specific corpus, and then, with the Keyword List, to generate a list of
words in your specific corpus sorted by their ‘keyness’ strength, that is, their
degree of unusual frequency in your specific corpus compared to their
frequency in the general reference corpus.
In one keyword analysis, Handford (2010) identified business meeting key-
words by comparing a reference corpus of everyday British speech with a
corpus of spoken business meetings in the Cambridge and Nottingham Busi-
ness English Corpus (CANBEC). Perhaps not surprisingly, business meeting
keywords included such nouns as customer, meeting, and sales, along with
time words like January, month, and moment (pp. 107–108). Particularly
interesting, however, were differences between keywords in “external meet-
ings” (i.e., between a business employee and outside client), and “internal
meetings” (i.e., among employees within the same business). Handford found
that although we was the most frequent keyword in both types of meetings, it
was notably more common in external meetings, likely due to employees’
use of “corporate we” when talking about their business with outside people
(pp. 108–109), as in a statement like “We should be able to accommodate
your request.” In addition, some business nouns like issue, price, and problem
were found to have greater keyness in internal meetings than in external
meetings, possibly because, as Handford points out, these words “have
58 ESP genre analysis

potentially negative connotations,” and thus might be avoided in external

meetings, where speakers, understandably, are attending to “the relational
aspects of communication” more so than in internal meetings (p. 110).

Concordance lines and word collocations

Corpus tools are also useful for analyzing the linguistic contexts in which a
particular word appears in a set of genre exemplars. A concordance tool, for
example, generates concordance lines showing the words that precede and
follow a particular word in each of its occurrences in the corpus. Below, for
example, are some concordance lines for the word significant in university
students’ critique texts (e.g., book reviews, product evaluations, academic
paper reviews) in the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE)
(Nesi & Gardner, 2012). These lines, which show several words before and
after significant, were ones I generated using Sketch Engine, the online
corpus tool linked with BAWE.

the durability and lifetime were also a significant factor to consider since
racing cars might
that absolute fiscal savings may not be significant enough to provide fast
payback on a potentially
although it is necessary to remember that a significant minority of noble
families did still participate
its focus, the book is probably the most significant work on international
relations in his
organic horticultural systems, by importing significant amounts of manure,
showed the greatest
with insurance-based benefits playing a significant role, and in terms of
gender—with the
work of Ostner and Lewis (1995) points to significant differences between
two welfare states

Some concordance lines for significant in critique genres

in BAWE
Reading through these lines allows you get an initial impression of some types
of words, such as differences and enough, that significant occurs within aca-
demic critique genres. These word co-occurrences are known as collocations.
The most frequent collocations for a particular word can also be generated
through corpus tools. The Sketch Engine collocation function, for example,
produced the following list of frequent collocates of significant in the critiques
(Table 3.2). As you can see, nouns like difference(s), change(s) and impact(s),
and role were among the most common word partners (collocates) of
significant.
 Lexicogrammatical features 59

Table 3.2 Frequent collocations with significant in critique genres in BAWE

Collocate Frequency of occurrence with significant
difference 11
in 16
differences 6
impact 6
changes 6
role 6
change 6
increase 6
figures 5
reduction 5
enough 5
effect 5
impacts 4

Using the wildcard * symbol

To generate concordance lines and/or collocates not only for significant but
also for its related word forms, you can use the wildcard symbol * at the
end of the root significan (i.e., significan*). Concordance lines and collocates
will then be shown for significant, significantly, and significance. As well,
you can use the wildcard symbol to identify phrases with particular struc-
tural frames, such as it * that, signifying a phrase that begins with it and
ends with that and has any word(s) in between. Hyland (2004b) found that a
concordance search on this pattern in RA abstracts generated lines with
phrases including it is likely that, it shows that, it is claimed that, it is clear
that. Examining these occurrences more closely in the abstracts revealed that
“academic writers use this phrasing extremely frequently to express their
evaluation of whether the following statement is likely to be true or not”
(Hyland, 2004b, p. 218). Thus, as Hyland’s analysis suggests, concordancing
and the wildcard function are useful not only for identifying instances of
words, phrases, or structures in a corpus but also for giving the researcher
substantial data from which they can infer possible functions of these items
in the corpus.

N-grams
Another way that corpus software can identify word combination patterns
is through N-gram analysis. Also referred to as lexical bundles, clusters, or
chunks, N-grams are “strings of words that frequently recur in a corpus”
60 ESP genre analysis

(Nesi, 2013, p. 418). Given that ‘gram’ in corpus studies typically means
word, a 3-gram would be a three-word string (e.g., under these circum-
stances), a 4-gram would be a four-word string (e.g., while I agree with),
and so on. N-grams are another lexicogrammatical element that can help
distinguish certain genres from others (Bednarek, 2012; Stubbs & Barth,
2003). Bednarek (2012), for example, found that key “trigrams” (i.e., 3-
grams) in a corpus of seven American fictional television series marked the
series’ language as heavily emotional. These key phrases, which included out
of here, I told you, and need to talk, appeared significantly more frequently
in the television series than in the reference corpus of general spoken
American English and often “in the context of negative emotions associated
with conflict, confrontation or other problematic issues that characters face”
(Bednarek, 2012, p. 56). In this way, the N-gram analysis revealed something
of the nature of speech in the TV series discourse, and helped lead Bednarek
to conclude that “emotionality emerges as the key defining feature of the
language of television” (p. 59, italics original).
Task 3.1 gives you a chance to practice with several corpus tools that we
have discussed above: word frequency lists, concordances, collocate lists,
and N-grams.

Task 3.1 Using corpus tools

Do one or both of the following options.

Option A: Using online tools in a corpus website

1 Go to the British National Corpus search engine at http://corpus.byu.edu/
bnc/, a corpus that includes 100 million words of various spoken and
written texts of British English.
2 In the Sections menu, select a spoken genre of interest to you, such as arts
lectures, public debate, sermons, courtroom discourse, or another genre.
3 In the open box, type a word that might be useful to examine in this genre.
For example, if you selected the genre of sermons, you could type in the
word well, and the website will generate a concordance of all of the
sentences contexts where well appears.
4 Scan through the concordance lines (at least the first 30 lines) and jot
down some notes on the contexts in which your word seems to occur.
What words often appear before or after it? What functions does the
word seem to serve in the texts where it appears? For example, if you are
looking at well in sermons, how does well function at particular junctures in
a sermon?
5 Now, go back to the Search page and click on Collocates. In the Collocates
box, type * (the wildcard symbol, meaning any), select how many ‘words
away’ you would like to search for Collocates (for example, “1” on the left
 Lexicogrammatical features 61

would mean all collocates immediately before the word, and “1” on the
right would mean all collocates immediately after the word). Then click
Find Collocates. Look at what words that your focus word collocates
frequently with. Which collocates confirm what you might expect about
this word? Which surprise you? Why do you think these collocations with
this word might appear frequently in this particular genre?

Option B: Using corpus software to analyze your own corpus.

1 Find several texts from one genre that you would like to analyze for its
lexicogrammatical features (e.g., online dating profiles, newspaper editorials,
eulogies, birth notices, company brochures, shareholder reports, tran-
scripts from comedic TV shows, political speeches). Make sure that you
have the texts in an electronic text file format that you can analyze with
corpus software. You can also download text examples of particular
genres for free from BAWE, BASE, MICASE, and the OANC. See their
websites to find out how to do so.
2 Go to the Antconc website at www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html,
and download the Antconc software. You may wish to watch Lawrence
Anthony’s excellent YouTube videos, particularly those on Getting Started,
Word List, Concordance, Keyword List, Collocates, and N-grams. Once
you have opened the software, select the files on your computer that you
wish to load into Antconc. These files will serve as your corpus.
3 Use the Antconc Word List tool to generate a word frequency list for your
corpus. What strikes you about the most frequent words in the texts—
particularly the content words?
4 Use the Concordance tool to create concordance lines for one of the fre-
quently occurring content words in your text. Read through the con-
cordance lines and notice what words frequently precede your word and
what words often follow it.
5 Select the Collocate tool and create a collocations list for your focus word.
Does this list confirm your impressions from reading the concordance lines
in step 4 and/or does it reveal other collocation patterns that you had not
noticed before?
6 Select the N-gram tool and search for 4-grams (i.e., 4-word clusters) in
your corpus. What N-grams are frequent in your texts?
7 What have you learned about your selected genre and its lexicogrammatical
patterns through the analyses above?

Combining manual and corpus linguistics approaches

We have thus far seen benefits of a manual, close reading approach as well
as of a corpus-assisted approach to studying lexicogrammatical features in
62 ESP genre analysis

texts. In order to capitalize on what both can show you about a genre, it is
often useful to combine them. Fernández-Polo (2014) used such a mixed-
methods approach in investigating the phrase I mean within the genre of
conference presentations produced by non-native English speakers at inter-
national conferences in Finland. His data set of 34 presentations came from
the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus, a pub-
lically available corpus of spoken texts (see Mauranen, 2006). In his analysis,
Fernández-Polo first used Antconc to identify the instances of I mean across
the presentations, and then examined on his own each of the 48 useable I
mean instances in terms of the role it played in the speakers’ presentations.
This latter process involved his subjective interpretation, which he says was
not always easy given that I mean sometimes appeared to serve more than
one function simultaneously.
His analysis generated quite interesting findings. Conference presenters
most frequently used I mean when they were repairing their language errors
or dysfluencies, such as in this example: “normally a district has one or two
hospitals and then everything else is either a hospital er i mean a health
centre or a dispensary” (from Fernández-Polo, 2014, p. 61). Too many uses
of this type of I mean in this way, observed Fernández-Polo, could make the
speaker appear anxious and unprepared, and thus “might harm the public
image speakers project of themselves before their audiences and compromise
the success of their presentations” (p. 62). Some uses of I mean, however,
contributed positively to the speakers’ talks. For example, I mean sometimes
signaled that the speaker was taking a moment to connect with the audience
through a minor digression. In the example below, for instance, the pre-
senter says I mean to transition to an aside about her frustration with the
term “digital divide”:

so let’s go to the project now i’m er okay and i wanted to say s-

another thing er after i described you the two countries briefly erm
with this project we wanted to address three divides first divide i mean
let me before i say the three divides i wanna say something i’m kind of
fed up with the word digital divide because i use it every day you
probably use it more than once a day if there’s a new concept to
bridge the digital divide please let me know i’m happy to you can have
the copyright i’m happy to use the word but it should be something
more constructive
(Example from Fernández-Polo, 2014, p. 64)

Fernández-Polo’s findings were made possible through combining software

tools, which identified relevant examples in his corpus, with Fernández-
Polo’s own human ‘brain tools’, which interpreted the functions of I mean
in these examples.
 Lexicogrammatical features 63

Task 3.2 The function of So I think in external business

meetings
Handford (2010) also combined manual and corpus-assisted methods in studying
N-grams in business meetings. Corpus tools identified So I think as a particularly
common 3-gram string in the CANBEC business meetings corpus, and then
Handford’s own analysis of corpus extracts with So I think revealed how it is
used in actual meetings. Read the following excerpt from a business meeting in
Handford’s (2010) study and then answer the questions about S1’s use of So I
think at the end of the extract. S1 is a logistics manager of a business and S3 is a
representative from an outside supplier. They are discussing how “spot orders”
(i.e., those that not planned) should be dealt with.

S1: So there’re gonna be a number of spot orders.

S3: Yeah
S1: Now are they gonna be huge quantities? On the whole not.
S3: Yeah.
S1: Sometimes they’re gonna be general export packs as well which obviously
will help because you might actually say we’ve got=we’ve got a stock of this.
S3: Yeah
S1: Someone’s cancelled an order. We’ve got some spare. We can actually
deliver in eight weeks as opposed to twelve weeks or something like that.
S3: Yeah
S1 So I think we’ve got to take a lot of this on a case by case.
(Excerpt from Handford, 2010, p. 138)

1 What might be the function(s) of S1’s use of the N-gram So I think in this
business meeting interchange? Why might S1 use it at this juncture?
2 If S1 did not start his last sentence with So I think and just began with we’ve
got to take a lot of this … , would his statement seem more or less
persuasive or compelling?
3 How might this N-gram have different effects depending on which word is
stressed in S1’s intonation—So, I, or think? Try reading the whole sentence
three times, each time stressing a different word in the So I think cluster.
4 How could you use your observations in 2 and 3 in teaching an ESP lesson
on the language of business meetings?

Studying linguistic politeness in genres

The rest of the chapter considers other studies that have combined manual
and corpus-assisted analyses of lexicogrammatical features. In the next sec-
tion, I concentrate in particular on mixed-method investigations of linguistic
politeness in various genres—a topic of much interest in ESP given that
64 ESP genre analysis

appropriately polite lexicogrammar is often critical for effective commu-

nication within various genres and with various audiences.
Genre-focused politeness studies have typically drawn on Brown and
Levinson’s (1987) well-known concepts of face, face-threatening acts (FTAs),
and linguistic politeness strategies (see Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Leech, 2014;
van der Bom & Mills, 2015 for further discussions of linguistic politeness).
Regarding face, Brown and Levinson proposed that in our everyday inter-
actions, we attend to two aspects of our hearers’ (or readers’) identity and
image: their positive face, that is, their desire to have their goals be in soli-
darity with others’ goals and to be liked and admired for them, and their
negative face, that is, their desire to have their actions “be unimpeded by
others” (p. 62). In simple terms, you can think of a person’s positive face as
their ‘please like me’ identity desires, and their negative face as their ‘please
don’t bother me’ identity desires. Brown and Levinson also highlight that, in
any person, these two types of face desires are vulnerable to face-threatening
acts (FTAs) from others. If your friend tells you she does not like your new
boyfriend, for example, that criticism is an FTA on your positive face
because it threatens your desire to have you and your goals accepted,
admired, and aligned with your friend’s goals. If your friend asks you to
help her move to a new apartment this weekend, on the other hand, that
request is an FTA on your negative face because it threatens to impede other
activities you had planned for the weekend.
Because speakers and writers are aware of their listeners’ and readers’
face desires, they often use what Brown and Levinson call linguistic polite-
ness strategies to mitigate the force of their FTAs. Specifically, they may try
to soften their FTAs though positive politeness language that attends to
their audience’s positive face, and/or negative politeness language that
attends to their audience’s negative face. Before criticizing your boyfriend,
for example, your friend might first give you a compliment (a positive
politeness strategy), such as You normally make wise life choices, in order
to build up your positive face (desire to be liked) and thus soften the blow of
her criticism coming a few seconds later. Or, when asking for your help
with her apartment move, your friend is likely to use negative politeness
forms like hedges and questions (e.g., Do you think you might be able to
help me move this weekend?), which tone down the directness of her request
and thus acknowledge your negative face need to be unimpeded.
These face-sensitive linguistic politeness strategies are relevant in any
genre with potential to express FTAs. Some obvious candidates are evalua-
tive reviews of various kinds (Belcher, 2007; Hyland, 2004a; Hyon, 2011) or
genres containing requests and directives (Koester, 2010). Positive and
negative politeness, however, can even be found in genres where we would
not necessarily expect them, such as in RAs and air traffic communications
(Moder, 2013; Myers, 1989; Hyland, 1996). Below I describe a few studies of
lexicogrammatical politeness strategies in two genres—RAs and workplace
 Lexicogrammatical features 65

interactions. These may give you ideas for studying linguistic politeness in a
genre you are interested in.

Hedges as politeness strategies in research articles

You might not think of RAs as being personal, emotional, or threatening
enough to require politeness. However, as Myers (1989) observed in his
analysis of 60 molecular biology journal articles, when RA authors make
claims about their research, they threaten their readers’ negative face, that
is, their desire to be unimpeded, by implicitly asking them to accept the
RA’s claims, give the authors credit for the claims, and/or potentially alter
or restrict their (the readers’) own future scholarship on this research topic.
To mitigate these potential FTAs, RA authors use lexicogrammatical devices
“to make [their claims] more polite,” and, in fact, the very presence of these
politeness strategies demonstrates “that the authors are aware of the FTAs”
(Myers, 1989, p. 6).
One such negative politeness device Myers noticed in the molecular biology
RAs was hedges. These are words and phrases that tone down the speaker’s
or writer’s certainty about an idea or claim (Hyland, 2005), and include
modal auxiliaries like may, might, should, and could; adjectives and adverbs
like possible, possibly, probably, and perhaps; verbs expressing some
uncertainty, such as seem, appear, and suggest; and certain sentence con-
structions like I + believe/think that … Examples of hedges from Myers’
study are shown below:

These findings suggest a common origin of some nuclear mitochondrial

introns and common elements in the mechanism of their splicing.
Thus, a common short sequence of RNA might be attached to several
mRNAs.
The three short segments … are probably spliced to the body of this
mRNA.
(Examples from Myers, 1989, p. 13, italics added)

Because such hedges express the author’s claim as a possibility rather than
as a fact, they reduce the imposition (i.e., threat to negative face) on the
author’s colleagues. That is, they suggest that the claim need not be accepted.
As Myers noted, “hedging is a politeness strategy when it marks a claim, or
any statement, as being provisional, pending acceptance in the literature,
acceptance by the community” (p. 12).
Hyland (1996), in his study of 26 articles in molecular biology, also found
that besides attending to readers’ needs, RA hedges serve “writer-oriented”
functions that provide researchers a face-buffer in case their claims are later
shown to be wrong. That is, hedges, by making claim statements provisional
and less than 100 percent certain, “allow authors to seek acceptance for the
66 ESP genre analysis

highest-level claim they can for their results while protecting them from the full
effects of its eventual overthrow” (Hyland, 1996, p. 445). In this way, hedges
offer RA authors a strategy of “self-politeness” (Chen, 2001), protecting (at
least partially) their own positive and negative face from future threats.

Politeness in spoken workplace genres

Linguistic politeness can also be studied in spoken genres. A number of ESP
investigations, for example, have examined politeness devices as a means of
promoting harmonious relationships in workplace interactions. In her analysis
of 66 office conversations in the American and British Office Talk (ABOT)
corpus, Koester (2010) identified several lexicogrammatical politeness forms,
outlined below, for reducing the negative FTAs of directives and requests in
these conversations. These included:

 Just as a hedge in front of an imperative, as in:

Just email me the names
 Indirect modals (e.g., can, would, want to, wanna), as in:
You can go ahead an’ put it back in here
We wanna keep the two cover sheets
I would have a quick word with Paul an’ just say look this is what
Zenith are after
 The use of Let’s, which carries the feeling of a suggestion rather than of
a strong directive, as in:
Let’s have a look at that one then
(Examples from Koester, 2010, pp. 79–80)

Koester (2010) points out that through these “indirect forms” employees
achieve “negative politeness, … mitigat[ing] the threat to the addressee’s
negative face” when trying to direct the addressee’s actions (p. 81). It is also
interesting to observe in Koester’s examples above that the We, I, and Let’s
show further deference to the hearer’s negative face by not saying to the
hearer that you have to do something (even though that is what is under-
stood), and suggesting rather that the speaker will help the hearer do the
action (even though that probably will not happen).
The relationship between speakers in interactive workplace genres is also
important to consider in examining the use (or non-use) of lexico-
grammatical politeness devices. Koester (2010), for example, observed that
the polite, indirect linguistic forms listed above occurred less frequently in
collaborative “decision-making” conversations among colleagues, where
“the more equal roles of the participants seems to reduce the risk of
 Lexicogrammatical features 67

performing face-threatening acts, thereby lessening the need for mitigation”

(p. 84). Handford (2010) as well found that speaker relationships influenced
the presence or absence of certain linguistic items known as backchannels
during business meetings. In Task 3.3 you get to explore his findings about
these backchannels and politeness.

Task 3.3 Backchannels, politeness, and business meetings

Backchannels are verbalizations like mm, hmm, okay, and right that speakers utter
when listening to someone talk. In his study of business meetings in the
CANBEC corpus, Handford (2010) discovered that the backchannels hmm and
sure relate in interesting ways to speaker–listener relationships, power, and face,
as illustrated in the following two excerpts from his study. Excerpt 1 is from an
internal (i.e., within the company) meeting between a manager and subordinate
on the topic of customer contract renewals. Read it and then consider the fol-
lowing questions.

Excerpt 1
S1: So if they’re only taking out for the quarter like till the end of the year.
S2: Hmm
S1: and then they’re taking out a full year’s contract. You would look it would
look in your database … your
S2: Yeah
S1: database … that … they should be up for renewal in [1 second] I dunno
October some time next year …
S2: Hmm
S1: and they wouldn’t. They’d then be up for renewal in January two thousand
and five.
S2: Oh okay.
(Excerpt from Handford, 2010, pp. 160–161)

1 In Excerpt 1, do you think S2 is the manager or the subordinate? Why?

2 In conducting a frequency analysis of hmm in his corpus, Handford found
that hmm “is over twice as frequent in internal meetings, and is approxi-
mately three times more common in manager-subordinate meetings than
peer meetings” (p. 160). Why do you think this would be so? Think about
what functions hmm serves in these interchanges.

Excerpt 2 comes from an external meeting in which S1, an employee from a

company, and S2, an outside client, are in a sales discussion.

Excerpt 2
S1: And then you know we’ve got a couple of questions to ask you and maybe
some …
68 ESP genre analysis

S2: Sure.
S1: er you know just a few things to ask you about.
(Excerpts from Handford, 2010, p. 161)

1 Handford (2010) found that sure as a backchannel did not occur in internal
meetings but was frequent in external meetings, like the one illustrated in
Excerpt 2. He suggests that this pattern has to do with the expectation
that in external meetings “face will be positively addressed” (p. 162).
Explain how S2’s sure expresses positive politeness.

For further discussion of face and linguistic politeness in other spoken

business genres, please see Nickerson and Planken’s (2016) helpful review.

Cross-cultural lexicogrammatical comparisons

The sections above illustrate how analyzing a genre’s lexicogrammatical
features—by hand and/or assisted with corpus tools—illuminates these
features’ functions, including in some instances, the expression of politeness.
As we saw with genre moves in Chapter 2, however, lexicogrammatical
patterns, even within a single genre, are often quite variable across different
cultural contexts.
To get at this variation, lexicogrammatical analysis, like move analysis,
can include cross-cultural comparison—at either or both the large, national
culture level or small, community culture level. In a comparison of 20
English and 20 Japanese book reviews, for example, Itakura (2013) investi-
gated how and why book review writers in the two sets of reviews (all
published in linguistics journals) used hedges as politeness devices when
praising the book they were reviewing. Although praise is not where you
would expect to see hedges (since it seems the opposite of face-threatening),
Itakura points out that in the context of book reviews, “praise is potentially
a face threating act to ‘self’ (the review writers)” given that review readers
may not agree with the praise and therefore could judge negatively the
review and the reviewer (p. 133). Hedges offer some protection against these
self-face risks of praise. In her analysis of the 360 praise segments in the 40
book reviews, Itakura found that praise was hedged almost three times as
often in the Japanese reviews as in the English reviews (31.7 percent of the
time vs. 10.5 percent of the time). She attributes this pattern to overarching
differences between English-medium and Japanese cultures, suggesting that
while the former celebrates positive politeness and solidarity-building (and
thus is comfortable with explicit praise), the latter “tends to emphasize
negative politeness and encourages distant social relationships and modesty”
(p. 145). As such, Japanese reviewers are more likely to be restrained, and
“to present themselves as non-committal, non-imposing, and humble” when
 Lexicogrammatical features 69

offering praise (p. 145). Despite these differences, Itakura did still find that
the English and Japanese book reviewers used some of the same praise-
hedging devices, including modals and epistemic verbs (e.g., think, believe).
Japanese reviewers nevertheless, though, also employed non-active-voice
constructions that added a further sense of vagueness to the praise, as in It is
thought that this book should be valued highly … (p. 140).
In a disciplinary culture comparison, Hyland (2005) studied the presence
of linguistic devices through which RA authors—all writing in English, but
in different disciplines—conveyed their stance, that is, their “textual ‘voice’”
expressing “their judgements, opinions, and commitments” (p. 176). These
stance devices include hedges (e.g., may, possibly), boosters, which ramp up
rather than tone down certainty (e.g., clearly, highly); attitude markers,
which convey the writer’s reactions and emotional attitudes (e.g., important,
unfortunate, surprisingly); and self-mention (particularly, the first person
pronoun I and related possessive adjectives). As well, Hyland compared the
RAs’ engagement devices, whereby authors explicitly connect with readers,
such as through reader pronouns (e.g., you), questions, directives, and per-
sonal asides. Through both corpus-assisted and manual analysis, Hyland
searched for and compared these stance and engagement features in 240 RAs
from eight disciplines: four ‘soft’ sciences (philosophy, sociology, applied
linguistics, and marketing) and four ‘hard’ sciences (physics, biology,
mechanical engineering, electrical engineering). He discovered that these
lexicogrammatical elements were much more frequent in RAs in the soft
fields than in the hard field RAs, which he attributed to the different
knowledge-making practices and goals of these academic cultures. For
example, because soft sciences tend to be “more interpretive” with “greater
possibilities for diverse outcomes,” writers in these fields, says Hyland, “must
spell out their evaluations and work harder to establish an understanding
with readers” (pp. 187–188).

Connecting moves and lexicogrammatical analysis

This final section of the chapter connects back to Chapter 2 by considering how
to integrate lexicogrammatical analysis into moves analysis. Such integration
allows you to see which vocabulary and syntactic patterns characterize
individual genre moves. For example, in RA introductions, a linguistic
examination of Move 1, Step a. (Establishing a Territory, Claiming Centrality)
reveals that it often features present perfect tense, recency expressions, and
words emphasizing importance and currency (Swales & Feak, 2012), as in In
recent years, there has been increasing interest in … . Partington’s (2014)
study of TED Talks (see Chapter 2 for more on this genre) also illustrates
how to examine lexicogrammar within the context of moves. Although not
using the term moves per se, Partington studied various segments of TED
Talks where speakers emphasize the importance of what they are saying and
70 ESP genre analysis

the lexicogrammatical devices that help them to do so (p. 148). One such
importance marker was the Wh-cleft, a syntactic construction that begins
with What and includes a copular be followed by a complement phrase with
the important information. In the following Wh-cleft examples from Par-
tington’s TED Talk corpus, the entire Wh-cleft is in bold and the comple-
ment is in italics.

What was very surprising to me was Tom’s critique …

Does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government? What
an election produces is a winner and a loser.
They don’t travel very far. What they’re very good at doing is hitchhiking,
particularly the eggs.
What I’m going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I’m
preparing called ‘Letters to a Young Scientist’.
(Examples from Partington, 2014, pp. 156–157,
underlining and bold added)

Notice that in these examples, the Wh-cleft gives extra importance to the
complement by pushing it to the end of the sentence, a typical placement for
new, emphasized information. As Partington (2014) says, Wh-clefts draw
attention to the post-copular element “by making the audience wait for the
relevant information” (p. 156). To test this idea, try changing the examples
above to ‘regular’ sentences without a Wh-cleft. You will see that the
regular sentences do not give the same punch to the focal idea as does the
Wh-cleft. Compare, for instance, What was very surprising to me was
Tom’s critique to Tom’s critique was very surprising to me, and consider
which one focuses your attention squarely on Tom’s critique. Partington
observed that one sort of place (move) in which these importance-marking
Wh-clefts occurred were TED speakers’ announcements of the next theme
they would discuss, as illustrated in the last example above about the
‘Letters to a Young Scientist’.
In a related genre, Deroey (2012) similarly observed that Wh-clefts are
found at certain “turning points” in university lectures, such as the intro-
duction, the beginning of an explanation, or a wrapping-up conclusion,
where the lecturer is highlighting a particular point (pp. 118, 122). It is
worth noting that Partington and Deroey used both corpus tools and
manual analysis to identify the Wh-clefts and their functions in their
corpora. Partington said he found particularly “fruitful” the “alliance of
close reading and concordancing.” His initial reading led him to notice
“items and pheonomena of interest,” which he then looked for more examples
of through the concordancing tool and could “judge whether patterns of use
and behavior might be discerned” (p. 146, italics original). And, using both
methods, he and Deroey were each able to discover some move locations of
the Wh-cleft structure in the TED Talk/lecture genres.
 Lexicogrammatical features 71

Stance features in fundraising letter moves

Also combining manual and corpus-assisted approaches, Biber, Connor, and
Upton (2007b) examined lexicogrammar within moves of “direct mail let-
ters,” a genre used by non-profit philanthropic organizations to solicit
money from readers. As the authors point out, fundraising texts like these
are similar to other promotional genres like sales letters and job applications
where “the purpose is to sell something” (p. 44). Given these letters’ “overtly
persuasive” nature (p. 62), the researchers were particularly interested in the
letters’ linguistic stance expressions (i.e., personal judgments, evaluations,
and opinions; see earlier discussion on stance), and in the distribution of
stance devices across the seven moves (see below). To this end, they ana-
lyzed 242 direct mail letters from the Indiana Center for Intercultural Com-
munication (ICIC) Fundraising corpus. A seven-move structure for this
genre was identified (see below), and two raters hand-coded all of the moves
in each letter. Then, the researchers employed a corpus tool known as a
“grammatical tagger,” to mark every stance feature, drawing on Biber
et al.’s (1999) stance taxonomy, in each move of every letter (p. 62).

Move structure of non-profit direct mail fundraising letters

Move 1: Get attention
Move 2: Introduce the cause and/or establish credentials of org[anization]
Move 3: Solicit response
Move 4: Offer incentives
Move 5: Reference insert
Move 6: Express gratitude
Move 7: Conclude with pleasantries
(From Biber, Connor, & Upton, 2007b, p. 52. Note: This moves
framework also contained steps within the moves,
which I have not included here).

The moves-specific lexicogrammatical analysis revealed several interesting

findings, one being that several of the moves used modal auxiliaries but differed
in the types of modals and the meanings they expressed. For example, in Move
3 (Solicit response), where the letter writers most directly asked for the read-
ers’ support, the ability modal can was the most common. In the example
below, it conveys the judgment that the readers are capable of giving money.

You can help people reach their dreams of reading and learning by
making a contribution to Indy Reads.

In Move 4 (Offer incentives), on the other hand, prediction modals like will
were more salient, as letter writers used them to describe future tangible or
intangible benefits that readers would experience if they donated to the cause.
72 ESP genre analysis

Corporate contributors will be acknowledged in our newsletter, the

annual report and on the Indy Reads webpage.
I am sure you will feel good about giving.

And in Move 5, where the writers “reference an insert” (e.g., a form or

envelope with the letter), modals of necessity and obligation like should
were used to direct the reader to do something with the insert:

For your convenience, I am enclosing a copy of Form CC-40, which

should be filed with your Indiana State Income Tax.

Another common grammatical structure in some of the moves, including

Move 3 (Solicit response), were “to-complement clauses,” which began with
a verb describing the hoped-for stance (e.g., agree, choose) of the reader
and, in the infinitive complement, made “clear what it is the organization
wants to reader to do in response to the letter” (p. 65).

We are hopeful that you will agree to help.

When you are contacted by your Campus Campaign volunteer, we
hope you’ll choose to become one of the many partners in the commu-
nity of IUPUI.
(Examples from Biber, Connor, & Upton, 2007b, pp. 65–66)

By analyzing the distribution of stance items in the letters, Biber, Connor,

and Upton were thus able to describe which items were used in what moves.
For teaching purposes, such a moves-specific description of a genre’s lex-
icogrammar would be more helpful than, say, simply telling ESP marketing
students that they need to use modals in direct mail letters. See if you can
try combining moves and lexicogrammatical analysis in Task 3.4.

Task 3.4 Connecting lexicogrammar and moves

1 Select a genre that you have already analyzed in terms of its moves. This
could be one of the genres mentioned earlier—for example, wedding
announcements, restaurant reviews, legal opinions, RA introductions or
discussion sections, lectures, TED Talks. Or it could be another genre that
you are interested in. You should gather at least two textual examples of
this genre.
2 Carefully examine one of the moves in your sample texts and note the
lexicogrammatical features that seem to occur in this move. These features
might include particular words or phrases or specific grammatical elements
such as modal auxiliaries, active or passive voice, certain tense-aspect
forms, or other syntactic constructions. If you have access to corpus tools
 Lexicogrammatical features 73

that will help you identify these features, feel free to use them. In any case,
though, you should also carefully study the features manually and take
notes on why they may be used in this move.
3 Explain how these lexicogrammatical features help to achieve the move’s
purposes and the purposes of the genre as a whole.

In this chapter, we have considered the value of both manual and corpus-
assisted approaches to examining lexicogrammatical features of genres,
including politeness devices and other stance features. As well, the chapter
has illustrated ways of studying these features across cultural contexts and
within individual genre moves. In the next chapter, we turn to complementing
these structural and linguistic investigations of genres with analyses of their
contexts.
Chapter 4

Analyzing genre contexts

As noted in Chapter 1, ESP has been characterized as ‘linguistic’ and text-focused

in its orientation to genre (Flowerdew, 2011). And this reputation is not without
basis, as ESP scholarship has focused much on describing genres’ structural
moves and lexicogrammatical features. Some strands of ESP scholarship and
teaching, however, also reflect considerable interest in understanding (and help-
ing students to understand) the social and personal contexts that shape and are
shaped by genres. Indeed, even at the advent of ESP genre work, Swales (1985b)
urged researchers to turn their sights more toward the settings of students’ target
genres. He argued that the field had “given text too great a place in nature” and
that we need also to understand “the roles texts have in their environments”
(p. 219). These environments might include concrete settings such as classrooms,
workplaces, and community centers, or more abstract contexts like academic
disciplines and whole national cultures. And in each of these contexts, genre-
interacting factors may be multiple, including the context’s physical conditions;
its human members and their varied values, histories, goals, and practices; and
the relationships among genres that operate within the context.
This chapter aims to attend to Swales’ early advocacy for studying genre
environments by exploring 1) what can be learned through context investiga-
tions and 2) how to do them. To these ends, the first half of the chapter con-
siders ways that genre context study illuminates several things, including
reasons for genres’ textual conventions, individuals’ experiences using genres,
relationships among genres in the same context, and ways that genres impact
their settings. The second half of the chapter turns to ethnographic and ‘texto-
graphic’ approaches to studying genre contexts, and gives you opportunities to
practice using techniques of these approaches in your own genre context studies.

The value of analyzing genre contexts

The ‘why’ behind genre conventions

A potential concern about linguistically oriented genre analyses is that their
structural descriptions may be treated by ESP students, or even their
 Analyzing genre contexts 75

teachers, as formulas to be strictly followed without sensitivity to the pur-

poses, rationales, or potential variability of these formal patterns. Analyzing
genre contexts helps to counter formulaic (and often overly simplistic)
treatments of genre by uncovering why genres look, sound, and feel the way
they do in relation to their settings, and how they change as their settings
change. As Hyland (2006) points out, examining genres (and genre use) in
their contexts “can help learners to demystify forms and patterns which
might otherwise be seen as arbitrary and conventional” (p. 274).
Swales and Rogers’ (1995) study of corporate mission statements illus-
trates ways that such ‘demystifying’ context investigation might be done. As
the authors suggest, mission statements make declarations about a com-
pany’s goals and principles, and, as such, frequently occupy a revered place
in company life, being often prominently displayed “on desks and walls and
doors,” and invoked at special events or “in times of crisis” (Swales &
Rogers, 1995, pp. 225–226). Given their explicit role “as carriers of ideolo-
gies and institutional cultures” (p. 225), these statements are also well suited
for investigating text–context relationships. Before getting to the specific
approach and findings of Swales and Rogers’ study, let’s take a look at two
company mission statements—one from a specialty grocery store and
another from an outdoor clothing company—and consider how such text–
context relationships might be operating in them.

Mission statement of Trader Joe’s (a grocery store chain):

The mission of Trader Joe’s is to give our customers the best food and
beverage values that they can find anywhere and to provide them with
the information required to make informed buying decisions. We provide
these with a dedication to the highest quality of customer satisfaction
delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, fun, individual pride, and
company spirit.
(Statement publically posted at local Trader Joe’s stores)

Mission statement of Patagonia (an outdoor-clothing company):

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to
inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
(Statement posted at www.patagonia.com/company-info.html)

These two statements clearly share some common purposes, moves, and
language, all focused on promoting their companies’ positive goals and
identities. Yet their differences also demonstrate that the mission statement
genre does not follow a single formula. The Trader Joe’s statement, for
example, foregrounds its good product values and friendly shopping experi-
ence. The Patagonia statement, on the other hand, (although also alluding to
its product quality) is loftier and more global in its vision, extending it to
76 ESP genre analysis

solving “the environmental crisis.” The texts also differ lexicogrammatically.

While the Trader Joe’s statement is written more conventionally as two
regular (albeit long) sentences, the Patagonia statement, with its series of
short verb phrases, has an edgier style.
A study analyzing the cultural environments of Trader Joe’s and Patagonia
might illuminate why they realize their mission statement moves and language
the ways they do. Swales and Rogers (1995) offer such a culturally oriented
investigation of the mission statements of two other major U.S. companies:
Dana Corporation, an automotive parts supplier, and Honeywell, a producer
of temperature control systems. To understand various elements of the com-
panies’ respective cultures, Swales and Rogers interviewed the corporate
executives, conducted several site visits, and reviewed documents on
the companies’ histories. Through this contextual digging, they found that
the “rationales” for the mission statements “were enmeshed within the con-
text of corporate history, culture and legend,” which in turn influenced the
specific ways that the two companies expressed the textual features of this
genre (p. 237). In this next task, you get to inhabit Swales and Rogers’
analytical shoes by considering how what they discovered about the culture
of one of the companies—Dana Corporation—could illuminate its mission
statement’s formal qualities.

Task 4.1 How corporate context shapes mission statement

features
Below are excerpts from the Dana mission statement, Philosophy and Policies of
Dana, that Swales and Rogers (1995) studied. I have included excerpts only from
the portion on “People,” the longest section of the statement. Read through
these excerpts and then answer the question that follows.

People
We are dedicated to the belief that our people are our most important
asset. Whenever possible, we encourage all Dana people within the entire
world organization to become shareholders, or by some other means, own
a part of their company.
We believe people respond to recognition, freedom to participate, and
the opportunity to develop.
We believe that people should be involved in setting their own goals and
judging their own performance. The people who know best how the job
should be done are the ones doing it.
We believe Dana people should accept only total quality in all tasks they
perform.
We endorse productivity plans which allow people to share in the
rewards of productivity gains.
 Analyzing genre contexts 77

We believe that all Dana people should identify with the company. This
identity should carry on after they have left active employment.
[…]
We believe in promoting from within. Dana people interested in other
positions are encouraged to discuss job opportunities with their supervisor …
(Excerpts from Swales & Rogers, 1995, Figure 1, p. 229)

1 What themes and lexicogrammatical patterns stand out to you in these

excerpts from the Dana mission statement?

Swales and Rogers (1995), as noted above, gathered various data on the Dana
culture. Below are some pieces of these data, each of which I have prefaced (in
italics) with the source that Swales and Rogers obtained it from. Think about
these data and answer the questions below.

From a site visit to the Dana headquarters: “[W]e were struck by the fact
that there were almost no papers visible anywhere (except in the Accounts
Department). Rather, the emphasis was on talking to people, their own
people, the Dana people …” (pp. 233–234, italics original).
From a statement about Dana in a 1986 issue of the business magazine
Industry Week: “As retired President Gerald B. Mitchell tells it, ‘We worked
to develop communication as an art. There is little, if anything written
down; it’s all done orally’” (p. 233).
From an interview with Dana’s Executive Vice President, who said the follow-
ing about the Mission statement: “What we have here is a belief system …
It’s a bit like when you pledge a commitment, as in church” (p. 234).
From investigating company history: The mission statement had not
changed for 20 years.
Observation from an interview with executives on the Dana Policy Committee
regarding the Mission Statement: “[T]hey see themselves as but disciples of
the company’s great leaders” (p. 234).

2 What sense do you get of the Dana company culture from Swales’ and
Rogers’ context data above?
3 Do these data shed light on the mission statement’s textual features that
you noticed in Question 1? How so, or how not? Are there additional
context data that you would collect to better understand the features in
the mission statement?

In 2004, Dana published a new version of their mission statement. Rogers,

Gunesekera, and Yang (2007) compared the old and new mission statements
and found that while they shared some features, they also exhibited notable
differences. Among the differences was a greater emphasis, in the new
78 ESP genre analysis

version, on using the company name within the sentence subject (e.g., Dana
or The Dana Corporation) rather than we. This change, they suggested,
indicated a sense of more centralized control in the company. Also interesting
(and perhaps reflecting again a more management-controlled culture) is the
mention in the new version of documenting in writing employee performance,
and quantifying employee achievement. Excerpts from the “People” section of
the 2004 Dana mission statement below illustrate these patterns.

Dana is dedicated to the belief that our people are our most important
asset. We believe people respond to recognition and trust, the freedom
to participate, and the opportunity to develop.
[…]
Dana is committed to 40 hours of education per person per year.
[…]
We encourage professional and personal development of all Dana
people. All Dana supervisors must review the job performance of their
people in writing at least once a year and work with their people to
formulate development plans that will increase proficiency in their given
disciplines.
[…]
Dana people are expected to generate at least two ideas per person
per month with a goal of 80 percent implementation.
(Excerpts from Appendix B: 2004 Statement, in Rogers,
Gunesekera, & Yang, 2007, p. 28)

Although Rogers, Gunesekera, and Yang did not have access to study the
Dana corporate culture as Swales and Rogers had, the authors still received
indication that the 2004 statement was influenced by present company life.
Specifically, a contact at Dana told the authors the following: “[The com-
pany’s] leadership team had changed dramatically, starting with a new
chairman and CEO. New leaders have brought different values and goals,
and our culture is changing” (in Rogers, Gunesekera, & Yang, 2007, p. 22).
For ESP teachers and students, one takeaway from these two studies of the
Dana mission statements is that formal conventions of genres are not static
but rather are shaped by evolving factors in the genre’s contexts.

Individual experiences of genre users

In addition to shedding light on reasons behind genre forms, studying con-
texts also offers glimpses into speakers’ and writers’ experiences with using
genres and what they find helpful, motivating, or challenging about doing
so. Human genre users constitute part of any genre’s contexts, and ‘hearing’
about their genre use practices can be useful for those, such as ESP students,
learning similar genres and wondering how and why to engage with them.
 Analyzing genre contexts 79

One context study foregrounding individual genre experiences is that of

Seloni (2014), who investigated a Columbian graduate student (Jacob) writing
within the difficult academic genre of a master’s thesis. Through interviews
and email correspondence with Jacob, as well as analysis of his thesis notes,
outlines, and drafts, Seloni learned of Jacob’s personal composing processes.
These processes helped Jacob meet the expectations of his U.S. master’s
program in visual culture, in part through allowing him to draw on linguistic
and other resources from his Columbian background. One of these processes
was a ‘conceptual map’ that Jacob created to organize his thesis content.
Written on a large white poster, this map included Jacob’s notes for his
thesis chapters and incorporated both Spanish (his native language) and
English. In an email message to Seloni, Jacob described his map’s color-coded
system for marking scholars’ work and his own ideas for his thesis:

Green is the theory I will be incorporating. These are the ideas and
quotes I am borrowing from books and articles, and how they relate to
one another [mainly in English]. Blue and black text is the ideas I’m
going to put in my thesis [only in Spanish]. Ideas I have gathered and
generated. Basically, these are my main arguments. And, red represents
the relationships between texts, and how I am navigating the theory
[both Spanish and English].
(Seloni, 2014, p. 89; for a photograph of Jacob’s map,
see Seloni, p. 89)

As Seloni suggests, Jacob’s genre use experiences are informative for both
ESP teachers and their students. Specifically, they highlight benefits for ESP
students of using “translingual” literacy practices (Seloni, p. 93), which draw
on their multiple linguistic skills—including those of their first language—in
order to guide their thinking and composing within complex, challenging
genres.
Studying individual writers and speakers can also shed light on why they
choose to participate in certain genres in the first place—particularly when
they are not compelled to do so for an academic program or for a job. In
such cases, the contextual forces guiding genre use may be more internal to
the individual people and their personalities and passions. Swales (1998)
considered such personal genre motivations in his study of professionals on the
different floors of his building at the University of Michigan. In interviewing
and observing the second floor University Herbarium researchers, Swales
came to appreciate the fit of each researcher for particular genres. Tony, the
Herbarium curator, for instance, had the “bonhomie,” “infectious enthu-
siasm,” and “resonant voice” that made him a natural for the public lectures
he gave to various organizations (p. 95). A passion for plant names, on the
other hand, motivated Ed, another of the Herbarium botanists, to work on
an extensive plant nomenclature code book and to write letters to
80 ESP genre analysis

newspapers correcting their “[plant] misidentifications and/or nomenclatural

errors” (p. 123).
On the third floor, which housed the English Language Institute, Swales
found that his colleague Joan Morley’s genre choices were similarly shaped
by personal conviction. In an interview with Swales, Joan suggested that her
professional writing, which had tended not to include critically evaluative
genres, reflected her non-antagonistic nature. As she told Swales, “[I]t isn’t
worth my time to trash something … the thing is I’m not is a criticizer, and
that’s probably part of the reason I don’t like to do [book] reviews” (Swales,
1998, p. 148, italics original). Instead, her primary body of work included
ESL pronunciation and listening textbooks as well as literature reviews and
plenary addresses. Joan’s professional values also influenced her style of
writing in these texts. Swales observed this style to be quite technical and
ordered, characterized by lists, charts, and clear explanations, and “keyed to
[Joan’s] long-standing concerns about the slow development of professional
standards in her field and her concern to establish a professional rhetoric”
(Swales, 1998, p. 158).

Other genres in the context

Beyond its institutional setting and human users, a genre’s context also
involves the other genres with which it interfaces, or what Bazerman (1994)
refers to as its system of genres: “interrelated genres that interact with each
other in specific settings” (p. 97). When these systems involve a sequenced
set of genres, they have also been called genre chains, whereby “one genre is
a necessary antecedent for another” (Swales, 2004, p. 18). Most genres you
can think of are part of a chained system: A hotel email confirmation follows
a phone reservation, which was triggered by a promotional flyer; a safety
inspector’s report precedes a building permit application that is then sub-
mitted with a loan application; a conference’s call for papers generates paper
abstracts, which then lead to acceptance and rejection notices. Under-
standing a genre’s context, therefore, includes awareness of other texts in
the system and the roles the genre plays in relation to them.
One study illuminating a genre system context is that of Tardy (2003),
who studied the chain of genres surrounding research grant proposals. In
the research funding system, the grant proposal itself is the “core” genre;
however, Tardy points out that “grant writers do not and cannot just
write a grant” but rather must engage with other texts in the system that
“respond to, incorporate, and necessitate one another” (p. 25). From
studying these texts and interviewing two experienced science grant writers
(a.k.a. Principal Investigators, or PIs), Tardy identified a sequenced genre
system for grant funding, which I have summarized in the list below. As
you will see, some genres in this chain precede and others follow the core
grant proposal genre (italicized).
 Analyzing genre contexts 81

Genre system of grant funding

 Principal Investigator’s (PI) networking conversations with colleagues
 Funding agency’s mission statement
 PI’s conversation(s) with Program Officer (PO) of funding agency
 Grant-writing support services at the PI’s university:
 Grant-writing workshops
 Guidelines and tips for writing grants
 PI’s application to use human subjects, submitted to Institutional
Review Board
 PI’s grant proposal to the funding agency
 PO’s selection of referees to review PI’s grant to the funding agency
 Referees’ reviews of PI’s grant and notification of funding decision
(Summary based on Tardy’s 2003 analysis)

Particularly interesting in this system is the fact that the written grant
proposal depends on several key spoken genres in the context. For example,
before completing the proposal, the PI has networking conversations with
colleagues who may help him/her find grant funding. One such crucial con-
versation is with the Program Officer (PO) of a potential funding agency;
here, the PI explains the research project to the PO, which may then lead the
PO to promote the proposal to the agency. Skipping this spoken genre can
stop the chain in its tracks. As one of the two grant writers that Tardy
interviewed said: “Everyone says talk to a program officer before even
thinking about writing a proposal … In two of the three [grants] that were
not funded, I failed in [this step]. I should have spoken to a program officer,
and did not” (interview comment in Tardy, 2003, p. 18).
One sign that a genre like a grant proposal is embedded in a genre system is
that it includes concrete “intertextual links” to other texts in the context
(Tardy, 2003, p. 23). As Berkenkotter (2001) puts it, these links demonstrate
that “texts we see in a genre system are responsive to, refer to, index, or
anticipate other texts” (p. 330). Berkenkotter observed such intertextual refer-
encing in the genre system of psychotherapy paperwork. One psychotherapist’s
notes on a client interview, for example, were shaped by diagnostic concepts in
the DSM IV, the standard professional manual on mental health disorders
(p. 337). As well, details from the psychotherapist’s notes could show up in
later genres in the client’s file like the treatment plan and the termination
summary. Participating in a genre, therefore, whether it be like these profes-
sional ones or others for different settings, requires not only learning that
particular genre as a stand-alone entity but also developing awareness of how it
relates intertextually with other genres in its context.
Task 4.2 asks you to think about a genre in terms of the genre system in
which it participates.
82 ESP genre analysis

Task 4.2 Outlining a genre system

1 Select one of the genres below and draw a box around it in the middle a
piece of paper.
a Course syllabus
b Phone call to customer service hotline
c Letter of recommendation for graduate school
d Marriage announcement
e Newspaper editorial
f Work visa application
g (Another genre you are interested in)
2 Next, outline the genre chain (or a partial one) in which your selected
genre participates. Do this by using arrows to connect the names of genres
that precede and feed into your selected genre (and into each other), and
those that follow your genre.
3 What intertextual links exist between genres in the system you have out-
lined? That is, how do the different genres in your system reference each
other. Give concrete examples.

Impact of genres on their contexts

Although genre context studies often focus on how genres are shaped by
their contexts, they can also illuminate an inverse relationship: how genres
influence their contexts. This latter orientation has been central to Rhetorical
Genre Studies (RGS), with its emphasis on the social actions that genres
produce in their settings (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010; Miller, 1984; see also
Chapter 1). A social-action focus should also be important in ESP. For it
highlights for researchers, teachers, and students that genres are not merely
forms you need to master to ‘get through’ a course or work project, but are
indeed mechanisms for doing things with consequences in the world. These
actions that genres produce may impact large contexts such as whole
industries, disciplines, and even countries; or their reach may be narrower,
though still powerful, affecting smaller communities or individual genre
users or recipients. The consequences of these actions for their contexts may
be positive, negative, or both—potentially benefiting some and not others.
To take one example genre with far-reaching social effects, consider political
speeches. These texts have incited and ended wars, inspired political move-
ments, changed public perceptions, and created leaders. Barack Obama’s
electrifying keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention is
one instance of a world-changing speech. It changed him from a relatively
unknown senator from Illinois into an overnight national star and paved the
way for his first presidential run and election as U.S. president. (To watch
 Analyzing genre contexts 83

an excerpt from and commentary on this pivotal speech, see www.youtube.

com/watch?v=OFPwDe22CoY&t=112s.) Genres can also impact more
localized political structures, as Winsor (2000) found in her study of a
“work order” genre at an agricultural equipment company. These orders
were produced by the company’s engineers and led to the company’s tech-
nicians performing work. However, the orders did not include a means to
recognize the technicians’ creative problem-solving in implementing the
engineers’ directives. As Winsor noted through her field observations and
interviews with company employees, “much of the knowledge-generating
work that is unique to the technicians vanishes, and only the engineer’s
planning seems to remain” (p. 176). In this way, this genre did the “political
work” of maintaining power hierarchies at the company and of influencing
perceptions of company activity (p. 180).
Other context investigations reveal personal effects genres have on indi-
vidual users. Collin (2014) observed such effects in his study of a U.S. sec-
ondary school’s Amnesty International club, where members spent part of
their weekly club meetings writing texts known as “Urgent Action Letters”
(UAL). Composing within this genre, Collin discovered, led the students to
internalize the concerns and passions of human rights activists. This identity
reshaping came about in part as students borrowed language from another
Amnesty International genre, Urgent Action Calls, which served as prompts
for the letters. The students adapted this language into their own first-
person voice. In the following excerpt, for example, we see how one student,
Danielle, incorporates phrases from a UAC regarding the safety of a Ban-
gladeshi social activist within her letter to the Bangladesh State Minister for
Women and Children’s Affairs. The italicized portions indicate the language
Danielle borrowed from the UAC.

Dr. Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury [Bangladesh State Minister for Women

and Children’s Affairs]
Although I am pleased with your response regarding the protection of
Shampa Goswami, I am imploring you to take all possible measures to
insure her safety. I am also urging you to ensure that a thorough, inde-
pendent and impartial investigation into the harassment of Shampa
Goswami is launched immediately and those found responsible are
brought to justice in proceedings which meet international fair trial
standards …
(From Collin, 2014, p. 29)

Collin points out that the passion for human rights seen in Danielle’s and
other students’ letters were not necessarily what led them to the club. Several
students, for example, had joined the club for “strategic reasons” such as to
build their résumés or to socialize with friends (p. 26). The fact that they
later became committed to social activism through their UAL writing
84 ESP genre analysis

suggests that using a genre (and its language) has the power to change one’s
personal identity and sense of purpose. Indeed, from his observations of
these students and their letters, Collin concluded that “emotional investment
in social justice,” in fact, “may be a product of engaging in activist literacy”
(p. 26, italics original)—and in activist genres like the UAL.
As this study suggests, genres can have profound personal effects on their
participants. And, as Schryer et al. (2012) discovered, these effects can even
occur at the end of life. They examined dignity interviews, a therapeutic
genre in which clinicians prompt dying patients to recount their most
important life events and accomplishments, and to share messages to their
loved ones. Questions from the dignity interview protocol include the
following:

Are there specific things that you would want your family to know about
you, and are there particular things you would want them to remember?
What are the most important roles (e.g., family, vocational, community
service) that you have played in life?
Why were they so important to you, and what do you think you accom-
plished in those roles?
What are your hopes and dreams for your loved ones?
What have you learned about life that you would want to pass along to
others?
(For complete dignity interview protocol,
see Schryer et al., 2012, p. 136)

The interviews are transcribed and read to the patients, who can request
revisions before the transcript is finalized into another genre, a “legacy
document,” that is given back to the patient (p. 112). Studying 12 such
legacy documents, Schryer et al. found that the dignity interviews had
allowed patients “to create a sense of discursive order out of their life
events” (p. 132), as reflected in excerpts from legacy documents below.

I think I’ve lived a really full life. I’ve had a lot of, probably difficult
experiences, in that I was a caregiver at a very early age to a sick
mother… I’ve got three great kids and they’re just so supportive in this.
They’re knocking themselves out to be here for me.
I actually feel pretty alive now, ironically, but I think that’s just
wisdom … Your perspective changes when you’re facing death, so I
think you do see things differently and time is of essence and you
appreciate things more …
(Excerpts from examples in Schryer et al., 2012, pp. 128, 130)

In sum then, studying the actions of genres reminds us (and our students)
of their power to transform their contexts and the people in them.
 Analyzing genre contexts 85

How to study genre contexts

Thus far, we have considered the value of studying genre contexts. The
second half of this chapter focuses on how to actually do a context study. It
begins with a brief conceptual overview of ethnographic and textographic
approaches to investigating contexts, followed by specific guidance on how
to collect and analyze data in these approaches. The chapter concludes by
considering ‘critical ethnography’ as an approach for studying power
dynamics in genre contexts.

Ethnography and textography

Ethnography encompasses a number of research processes for examining
social contexts. Although ethnography’s origins are in cultural anthropology,
its methods have been used in various fields, including ESP genre studies
(Dressen-Hammouda, 2013; Hyland, 2006; Lillis, 2008; Paltridge & Starfield,
2016; Paltridge, Starfield & Tardy, 2016; Smart, 2012). One of the defining
features of ethnography is its attention to emic, i.e., insider, perspectives, of
those who live or work in the context being studied. To elicit these perspec-
tives, ethnographic studies employ qualitative methods of data collection, such
as interviewing and observing context-insiders and examining texts and
other artifacts from and about the community. The analysis of these data is
also qualitative in that it seeks to understand “the nature of phenomena”
(DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011, p. 2) through close reading of the data for themes.
Another characteristic of ethnographies is that they are carried out over
extended time periods so that the researcher can gain the context-insiders’
trust, elicit their viewpoints, and develop deep insights into the context.
Truth be told, there are few ESP genre context studies that are ethno-
graphies in the strict sense. A major reason for this is that an ethnography is
extremely comprehensive and time-consuming, involving not only multiple
qualitative data sources but also long-term investigation of the context with
multiple, repeated data collection points along the way. To give you an idea
of the scope of an ethnography, consider Lillis and Curry’s (2010) study of
50 researchers in Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, and Portugal. Over a period of
eight years(!), Lillis and Curry collected 50 literacy history interviews with
the scholars, 208 other interviews, 1,192 of the scholars’ texts, approxi-
mately 2,000 email exchanges, 500 pieces of written correspondence between
the scholars, colleagues, reviewers, and editors; observations and field notes
from 60 site visits, and various institutional and national policy documents.
This tremendous amount of data formed the basis of Lillis and Curry’s
ethnography of the scholars’ research writing contexts. Many ESP scholars,
however, may not have the time or desire to complete genre context studies
of that scale. Thus, rather than full-fledged ethnography, they may engage in
what Swales (1998) has called textography, an approach that incorporates
86 ESP genre analysis

ethnographic methods to study a genre’s context but with a restricted scope

and time frame. As Swales (1998) describes it, textography is “something
more than a disembodied textual or discoursal analysis, but something less
than a full ethnographic account” (p. 1). Also, the text in textography signifies
a continued strong emphasis on analyzing textual patterns (as is characteristic
of ESP), with the context analysis illuminating forces shaping and being
shaped by these textual features (see Paltridge, 2008; Starfield, Paltridge &
Ravelli, 2014, for further discussion of textography).
Swales’ examination of the three floors of his office building, described
earlier in this chapter, was a textography. For it, he drew on a site study of
the building (both its past history and current practices), interviews with
seven of the building’s inhabitants, analyses of their publications, and con-
sideration of their feedback on Swales’ emerging interpretations. Thus, as in
ethnographies, emic perspectives were gathered via observations, interviews,
and historical research, yet ESP-style textual analysis of the participants’
genres still remained important. In addition, the scope of Swales’ study, while
not small, was modest, focusing on the textual lives of seven key members of
the building. The next section describes several ethnographic-textographic
methods for studying genre contexts and guidance on how to apply them.

Collecting qualitative data

Interviews
Interviews are among the most common means of collecting qualitative
data. They work well for ethnographies or textographies because they
directly elicit perspectives on the text or context being studied. They can
also be adjusted for how controlled or flexible they are, depending on your
study’s design. There are, for example, structured interviews, where the
researcher asks the exact same questions to all of his/her interviewees,
making it possible to systematically compare each answer across the parti-
cipants. Unstructured interviews, on the other hand, are like open-ended
conversations guided only by a loose plan that the interviewer may or may
not follow (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011; Tracy, 2013). This low-control-type
interview may work if you are not concerned with response comparability
or if you have an opportunity to interview your participant(s) more than
once. In many qualitative studies, including those of genre contexts, inter-
views are often semi-structured, having a set of prepared questions to guide
the interview and ensure some consistency, but with room for the researcher
to spontaneously go off-script in order to explore something of interest that
emerges during the interview.
To help ensure that your interviews generate useful information for your
context study, it is critical that you spend time carefully planning your
questions. The following are some tips for designing effective interview
 Analyzing genre contexts 87

questions, synthesized from advice from DeWalt and DeWalt (2011), Tracy
(2013), and others.

1 Think about what you want to find out from your interviewees. If you
are studying the context of newspaper editorials, for instance, you
might be interested in how the opinion page staff decides on its editorial
topics; the processes their writers use to compose the editorials; the kinds
of responses they receive from readers; and any impact the editorials have
on public policy. Once you have an idea of what you would like to find
out, focus your interview questions on these aspects, using the tips below
to make sure they elicit the desired content.
2 As a general rule, keep the bulk of your interview questions open-ended.
Unlike close-ended yes-no questions, open-ended queries, such as How
does your staff decide on the focuses of your editorials on any given day?,
invite extended answers that may even take the interview in unexpected
(though fruitful) directions. If you do ask a close-ended question, plan to
follow it up immediately with an open-ended tag question like Why?
How? In what ways? Can you tell me more about that?
3 Avoid leading questions that assume particular answers, such as Your
company newsletter probably improves employee morale, doesn’t it?,
What are the biggest problems the hourly workers at this company have
with the management?, or Which of these factors most shape the content
of your lectures—current events, upcoming exams, or your own mood?
These leading questions pigeonhole your interviewees into answering a
certain way and thus may not elicit their emic insights into the phenomena
at hand. To be more neutral and open, these bad-example questions
could be reworded along the lines of To what extent has your company
newsletter affected employee morale?, How would you describe the
relationship between management and hourly employees?, What determines
the content you select for your lectures?
4 Avoid double-barreled questions. These are questions that actually con-
tain two or more questions posing as one and ask interviewees to respond
to both at once, such as this question: To what extent is this grant pro-
posal thoroughly developed and appealing to the grant funding agency?
Faced with a multi-faceted question, your interviewee may only answer
one part of it. So it is better to split such questions into separate ones.
5 Use clear, simple language and avoid scholarly jargon. If you ask ques-
tions like What rhetorical moves are obligatory in your sermons?, How
do these lexicogrammatical features reflect your discourse community’s
values?, or Tell me about your translingual literacy practices?, your
interviewee (who is not likely a genre analyst, applied linguist, or
anthropologist) will be confused, intimidated, or annoyed by your high-
flown language. More accessible versions of these questions would be
What sorts of things do you usually include in your sermons?, I notice
88 ESP genre analysis

that the phrase “global solutions” occurs a lot in your company’s mis-
sion statement. Can you speculate on why this might be?, and You said
that you use both English and Korean when you take notes in your
graduate classes. Tell me more about why you do that.
6 Start off your interview with an easy, inviting question to establish a
comfortable rapport with your interviewee. For example, Why did you
decide to study nursing? How long have you been reviewing abstracts
for this conference? When was your company founded? Please note that
even before this opening question, you may need to explain your study
and get your participants’ consent to be interviewed. (See more on this
in the section below on getting permission to conduct your research.)
7 Special question types. For your interview, you can consider asking
some of the following question types described by Tracy (2013), which
are particularly useful for eliciting interesting responses from your
interviewees.
a Tour questions. Ask your interviewee to give you a “tour” of an
event or setting. For example, Can you describe a typical work day
for you? or Tell me about the steps you go through when writing a
legal brief.
b Posing the ideal. Your participants here can describe their vision of
a perfect activity, genre, or situation. For example, What does a
perfect conference abstract contain?, Describe to me an ideal meet-
ing between you and a client, and What are the best types of reader
responses to your editorials?
c Motives questions. You may be interested in finding out your
participants’ reasons for their or others’ choices or preferences, for
example, You said earlier that you like giving public lectures; why
is that?
d Elicitation questions. One good way to get at your participants’
impressions is to present them with an example of something you
are interested in (e.g., a genre sample, a video, or an object of some
kind, and have them comment on it). For example, Here is your
company’s mission statement, which is posted online. What do you
think is most important to notice about it? or I have here a short
article describing your company’s culture. Can you read it and tell
me how accurate you think it is?
8 Wrap up your interview with a ‘catch-all’ question like Is there any-
thing else you would like to say about X that we haven’t covered? or
Is there a question I should have asked but didn’t? This allows your
participant a final chance to share information that may be useful to
your study.
9 Close your interview by thanking your interviewee and, if applicable,
letting him/her know when findings of your research will be available.
 Analyzing genre contexts 89

Task 4.3 Creating good interview questions

1 Based on what you have learned above about designing good interview
questions, rewrite the following not-so-good questions.

a Are sales letters used in this business?

b What problems do you have with writing sales letters?
c How are sales letters and calls useful for generating new customers?
d Describe syntactic characteristics, including tense-aspect constructions,
of the prototypical sales letter genre.

2 Select a written or spoken genre whose context you are interested in

studying. Think of a type of person who regularly uses or evaluates that
genre. Then write 5–10 interview questions you could ask this person
about their experiences with that genre and/or the settings in which it is
used. Keep in mind the tips for designing good questions discussed above,
and try to use at least three of the special kinds of questions (e.g., tour
question, posing the ideal, etc.).
3 Write a short reflection on what it was like writing these interview ques-
tions, including how easy or difficult it was and what you learned from
doing it.

Observations
Another key qualitative method for studying contexts is the researcher’s
first-hand observations. By watching, listening to, and noticing key aspects
of the setting, researchers familiarize themselves with the context. This kind
of close observation helps generate what is known in ethnography as thick
description, that is, “building up a detailed picture of places, people, and
resources” that are significant in the context (Lillis, 2008, p. 367). In a genre-
focused context study, researchers may observe such things as the physical
sites where the genre is used and/or the behaviors of people participating in
the genre. While investigating the publishing experiences of international
scholars, for example, Lillis (2008) wrote the following thickly described
observation of a research department in Eastern Europe:

It is a drab 1960s building with locked doors at ground floor entrance

and second floor where the department is. Scrawled on the locked
entrance door to the department in black felt pen is a large A (we heard
the story later—how the department had battled to secure an A rather
than a B grading for their research and the head of department had
defiantly and delightedly scrawled the letter on the door). The corridor
was dark—little natural light and no electric lights switched on (again
90 ESP genre analysis

later we heard they were saving on electricity bills given [the] small
annual budget they had to work within). (Notes, July 2, 2001)
(From Lillis, 2008, p. 369)

Noticing these details of this site helped Lillis to establish “the impact of the
relative scarcity of economic resources on scholarly writing in this eastern
European institution” (p. 371).
Flowerdew and Wan (2010) also used observation to illuminate factors
shaping tax audit reports in Hong Kong. Indeed, observations and inter-
views complemented their structural moves analysis and “proved invaluable
in highlighting the true pedagogical needs of the aspirants to the [tax
auditing] profession” (p. 90). Task 4.4 asks you to consider how Flowerdew
and Wan’s context observations shed light on skills required of writing audit
reports.

Task 4.4 Observations of a genre context

During their study, Flowerdew and Wan (2010) observed an auditing team at
work at a client site in Hong Kong. Read the following excerpts from their
written observations and then answer the questions that follow:

They seemed to be a relaxed, albeit tired group, but they immediately

changed into business mode once the client’s accountant came in at 10:15
am. The accountant and the auditors started off discussing the company at
hand; who was who, the size of the business, profits and losses of the past
few years, and the nature of the business. When the accountant left, the
audit senior introduced a discussion of the assignment of tasks … Each
auditor took on a different section of the audit, i.e. the trainee and the audit
senior took on the banking section, while the audit assistant worked on sales
and expenses and the supervisor worked on fixed assets and debtors.
The group then started to comb meticulously through stacks of invoices
and company files, double-checking their investigation with the company’s
financial statements. Even though Chinese was being spoken, the documents
were all in English. The auditors each had their own notebook computer;
they moved from combing through a file or invoice (with pencil and ruler),
to checking the company’s financial statements, to inputting data into their
own computers. Through this entire work process there was spoken com-
munication between the auditors … The auditors even left their seats at one
time or another to ask the client’s in-house accountant questions regarding a
particular invoice or file. Spoken communication was in the form of asking
and giving information, explaining, problem-solving and socializing.
Throughout the visit to the company and observation of the audit, the
observer was surprised by the number of technical English terms used by
 Analyzing genre contexts 91

the auditors. The following spoken English terms, mixed in with the Man-
darin or Cantonese were noted down throughout the observation: open
market value, external valuer, controlled entities, equity methods, assets,
depreciate, and material misstatement …
(Flowerdew & Wan, 2010, pp. 82–83)

1 What can be learned about writing an audit report from Flowerdew and
Wan’s contextual observations that could not be gleaned from a text
analysis alone?
2 How could this information be useful for ESP teachers developing an
English for Accountants class? For example, given Flowerdew and Wan’s
observations, what types of activities might teachers include when covering
the audit report genre?

Participant observation
One category of observation that is a hallmark of ethnography is participant
observation. Here “a researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals,
interactions, and events of a group of people” in order to develop a deep
sense of the cultural context (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011, p. 1). The famous
Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1922 ethnography of the
Trobriand people in Melanesia, argued the following about how participant
observation facilitated contextual understanding:

[I]t is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, note
book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on. He can take
part in the natives’ games, he can follow them on their visits and walks,
sit down and listen and share in their conversations … Out of such
plunges into the life of the natives—and I made them frequently not
only for study’s sake but because everyone needs human company—I
have carried away a distinct feeling that their behaviour, their manner
of being, in all sorts of tribal transactions, became more transparent
and easily understandable than it had been before.
(Malinowski 1922, pp. 21–22)

Sometimes it is not possible to immerse oneself in a community’s activities,

including their genre-oriented ones. In the case of the auditor report study,
for example, it appears that Flowerdew and Wan were only able to partici-
pate peripherally by being in the same room as the auditors but not by
actually doing the audits with them. In other situations, however, you might
be able to take part more fully in the context’s happenings. Van Willigen
(1989), for instance, while studying aging adults in rural Kentucky, “spent
time working on church renovation projects, visiting shut-ins and the sick,
92 ESP genre analysis

and attending Bible class,” among other activities (p. 58). Starfield (2011)
also, when observing South African undergraduates writing essays for a
sociology course, immersed herself part-way in their academic activities by
attending their weekly class lectures and tutorials.

Taking field notes on observations

In making context observations, of either the non-participant or participant
variety, it is a good idea to take detailed notes that you can refer back to
later. In ethnography, these are called field notes, taken while you are out
observing ‘in the field’, and used not only to record things you literally see
and hear, but also your interpretations of what is interesting or meaningful
about them. While you are observing, you may only have time to make
quick scratch notes or jottings about what you have noticed about the con-
text (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011). However, these should then be turned
into complete sentences and paragraphs as soon as possible because “[t]he
notes get ‘cold’ and detail is lost the longer the interval between jotting and
writing” (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011, p. 165). In these fuller field notes, it is
important to include as many particulars about the context as you can
remember, as well as your initial thoughts about them. These notes will help
you greatly in your data analysis and writing phases, and you will be able to
pull examples from them to illustrate patterns in your data.
In turning a jotting into a full description, you have a chance to reflect on
and interpret context details that you might otherwise not notice. Field note
composing also encourages a creative writing style that is sometimes missed
in scholarly texts. Recall, for example, Lillis’ vivid description of the “drab
1960s building” of the Eastern European research department. Indeed,
interesting excerpts from ‘thick’ field notes can make an article or chapter
fun to read (and to write). Task 4.5 gives you practice with writing your
own notes.

Task 4.5 Writing field notes

1 Select a context you are interested in observing. This could be an everyday
context like a city bus, a local park, or a restaurant; a workplace context
such as a business meeting; or an academic context like a graduate seminar
you are taking.
2 Select a time when you can observe an activity in that context, such as a
conversation, ritual, game, or other occurrence, for at least 15 minutes.
This could be an activity related to a genre you are interested in within
that context.
3 While or soon after you observe the activity, write jottings of key details
and words from the scene.
 Analyzing genre contexts 93

4 Within four hours, expand your jottings into a detailed field note of at least
300 words with complete sentences and paragraphs. Feel free to use a
creative style in your notes.
5 Be ready to share what this field note experience was like for you.

Historical investigation
To understand a genre’s context, it is also useful to study the context’s
history. Historical investigation may involve gathering documents from or
about the context during a particular period of time as well as interviewing
people familiar with the setting at different points in its history. In studying
the mission statements of Dana Corporation and Honeywell, for example,
Swales and Rogers (1995) researched the companies’ leadership and visions
over several decades, in part through past news articles and interviews with
company leaders, and connected the companies’ periods of stability or
change to their mission statements’ discourse. Starfield (2011) too, in her
investigation of students’ academic writing experiences at a South African
university, examined archival texts on the student body demographics. She
also collected data on “the university’s response to apartheid and segregated
education,” as well as student newspapers and political pamphlets on
campus during the year of her study (p. 180).

Gaining access to a context

If you are planning to study a genre context, you will need to gain access to
it and get permission to study it. The most readily accessible contexts are
probably ones that you already participate in and have the trust of the
members. If you are interested in studying religious sermons’ functions in
your own church, for instance, you will likely be able to observe the weekly
church sermons, interview your minister about them, and mine your church’s
archives for previous sermons. If you are not a member of the context,
another option is to contact a friend or colleague who is. Flowerdew and
Wan (2006), for example, report that one of them knew the senior account
manager at the Hong Kong accounting firm where they were able to study
tax computation letters. Alternatively, you could volunteer at the site in
order to get your foot in the door for your research project. Mendoza-
Denton (2008), for instance, was a volunteer tutor in a California secondary
school where she studied Latina girl gangs and their members’ cultural and
linguistic practices, including their use of phonological and discoursal forms
marking in-group membership.
If you have no such ready ‘in’ to your desired context, gaining access may
still be possible. But you will need to get the permission of a context
member who has authority to green-light your research or to connect you
94 ESP genre analysis

with someone who can. DeWalt and DeWalt (2011) recommend contacting
the “gatekeepers” of the context (p. 42). In a school setting, these might be
program directors or principals; in workplaces, managers or business
owners; in non-profit groups, directors and so on. In studying farm worker
communities in Mexico, DeWalt and DeWalt spoke with community leaders
and then attended meetings of an agrarian reform organization where they
presented their research project and asked for the community’s consent to
do it. In this process of gaining permission, you might also offer to contribute
something, such as sharing your research results with the community.
Winsor (2000), for instance, presented her findings about work order reports
to the agricultural equipment company she had studied.
You may also need to gain official permission from your university or
research institution to collect data on your context. Any data involving
human participants, such as interviews, observations, or participants’ texts
(e.g., student essays or employee reports), usually requires informed consent
given by your participants after they have been informed of your research
project and of any risks or benefits of participating in it. Obtaining informed
consent helps ensure that individuals in your study will not be harmed or
exploited. Many universities have guidelines for what to include in informed
consent, as well as an institutional review board or ethics committee that
reviews your data collection procedures before you are allowed to carry out
your study.

Analyzing qualitative data

Ethnographic data collection methods tend to generate lots of transcripts,
notes, and other texts to sort through. Analyzing all of these data in terms of
what they suggest about your genre context can be challenging (though also
enjoyable). This next section describes several concepts in qualitative data
analysis to guide you through this process: triangulation/crystallization of data,
reading data for patterns, and integration of emic and etic interpretations.

Triangulation/crystallization of data
In ethnographic or textographic studies, the researcher typically gathers and
compares data from several methods so as to gain a fuller sense of the con-
text than would be possible from just a single data source. This analysis of
data from multiple sources is what is known as triangulation, a process
whereby you see whether a pattern is supported by more than one type of
data; for example, do your interviews and observations both suggest that
managers at a company have difficulty writing end-of-year progress reports?
A related notion is crystallization, the idea that you can look at the same
phenomenon from different angles, as through different sides of a crystal
(Tracy, 2013). Departing from triangulation’s focus on cross-validation
 Analyzing genre contexts 95

across data sources, crystallization involves embracing various data points

“even when they do not converge” (Tracy, 2013, p. 236). For example, the
documents from a church archive may tell you one thing about the church’s
history, while interviews from church members may tell you another. Within
a crystallization approach, this is okay. Differing data sources, even when
contradictory, contribute to a “multi-faceted, more complicated, and therefore
more credible picture of the context” (Tracy, 2013, p. 237). Triangulation and
crystallization of data also contribute to the ‘thick description’ valued in
ethnography.
An additional way to help triangulate or ‘crystallizate’ your data analysis is
to check your impressions with insiders in the community you are studying—
a process that has been called participant verification or participant feedback
(Dressen-Hammouda, 2013; Flowerdew & Wan, 2010). Swales (1998) used
such a process in his textography of the University Herbarium, asking Bill, the
Herbarium director, for feedback on his (Swales’) chapter drafts.

Reading and coding data for patterns

After or even while gathering data from various sources, qualitative
researchers read and re-read their data looking for interesting patterns or
themes. And as you did with genre moves (Chapter 2), they code their data
in terms of these recurring patterns (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011; Tracy, 2013).
This coding can be done in a relatively informal way, such as by using
colored pens to mark key themes in the data. If a researcher were studying
the genre of nursing care plans in a hospital context, for example, s/he might
mark in green everything in her data that addresses how this genre evolved
in the hospital setting (code: evolution), blue for how the genre is currently
used in the hospital (code: current uses), red for what parts of this genre
nurses think are most important (code: important parts), and yellow for
how this genre affects patients (code: impact on patients). The researcher
could then look across his/her data from all of the sources—interview tran-
scripts, field notes, historical documents, and so on—and find all of the
sections s/he coded in yellow, for instance, and notice what triangulated or
crystallizated patterns emerge around this theme of impact on patients.
Also, as with coding moves, you may revise your initial codes in response to
new patterns emerging during your research and writing processes.
Of potentially great help is software specifically designed for coding
and analyzing qualitative data. Two such software programs are atlas.ti and
NVivo, which allow you to assign codes to different parts of your data files and
then easily pull up all parts of your data that you have assigned a particular
code. For instance, taking our previous example of the nursing care plans, I
could select the code “impact on patients” and all of the sections I marked with
this code in field notes, interviews, and other data will appear in a list. This
capability can save significant time in finding examples of particular patterns.
96 ESP genre analysis

Interpreting patterns via emic and etic perspectives

As you identify patterns in your context data, you can draw on both emic
(insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives to interpret what is meaningful in
these patterns. Although it is emic views that are foregrounded in ethno-
graphy, outsider perspectives are also important because they illuminate
what may not be noticed by insiders. If you invite a friend to your house for
a holiday celebration, for instance, your friend may notice certain ways that
your family members talk to each other at dinner (e.g., your brother always
interrupts you) that you do not recognize because you are so used to these
behaviors.
Smart (2006, 2012) also found in his ethnography of genres in the Bank of
Canada that both emic and etic views helped him to interpret interviews he
conducted with three senior economists at the Bank. In each of these inter-
views, the economist interviewed described the Bank as “steering the economy
on a course into the future, towards a particular goal” (2012, p. 154). Smart
then related this emic view of the bank’s economists to an outside (etic)
concept of ‘activity system’, which he was familiar with as a discourse
scholar and which emphasizes, in part, the role of collaboration among
people and activities in service to common goals. Of particular use was a
paper Smart had read on the activity system of ship navigation, whereby
crew members work collaboratively gathering information about the ship’s
bearings in order to steer toward the harbor. This activity system concept
and ship example, in tandem with the insider economist interviews, allowed
Smart to see more clearly how the Bank of Canada’s economists work
together in a collabortive activity system, taking ‘sightings’ of the nation’s
economy, using genres to interpret those sightings, and, as such, helping to
put the Canadian economy on a particular course. In your own studies of
genre contexts in which you are not an insider, you may also find that your
particular background knowledge and experience offer you etic insights into
the situation that complement those of the insider members.

Critical ethnography
For this last section of the chapter, we consider critical ethnography, an
approach to studying contexts that includes special attention to power
dynamics and power inequities. Critical ethnography employs the same qua-
litative methods described above (interviews, observations, and so on) but
does so not only to describe contexts but also to critique those aspects of
contexts that empower some participants while oppressing others (Madison,
2012; Starfield, 2011). In this way, it brings a social justice orientation to its
research focuses. As Madison (2012) writes, critical ethnography “begins with
an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within
a particular lived domain” (p. 5, italics original).
 Analyzing genre contexts 97

In ESP, critical ethnographies of genre contexts have not been common, a

fact that is consistent with ESP’s reputation of being more ‘pragmatic’ than
critical in its orientation to genre analysis and genre-based teaching (see
Chapter 5). But there have been a few critically focused ESP context studies.
Lillis and Curry (2010), for example, examined working conditions that
negatively impact the production of RAs by scholars in non-English-medium
countries. These conditions include cultural prejudices the scholars face
when trying to publish their articles in international journals. Starfield
(2011) as well investigated racial prejudices restricting black undergraduates’
chances of success in writing academic essays at a previously all-white South
African university. Her various sources of qualitative data revealed that
within the dominant discourses at the university, black non-native English-
speaking students were assumed to be “non-legitimate ‘foreigners’” who
were incapable of getting above the minimum 50 percent passing mark on
their essays (pp. 182–183). In addition, Starfield found that students’ personal
life experiences were devalued by the faculty for whom they were writing. In
her role as a critical ethnographer, Starfield not only raised awareness of
these power dynamics but also made recommendations for changing such
dynamics in this and similar settings. She writes that for those students
“who feel particularly ‘foreign,’ we need to find ways to listen to what
they bring and enable them to access the knowledges and skills that uni-
versities offer while not feeling they need to lose what they bring with
them” (pp. 190–191). Thus, in critical ethnographies, including those in these
ESP genre contexts, the researcher is not only a descriptive observer of a
context’s power issues and but also often an advocate for the context’s
participants.

Task 4.6 Genre context study

This task asks you to draw on some of the chapter’s concepts in planning your
own context study. Complete either Option A or Option B.

Option A: planning a genre context textography

1 Think of a genre you are interested in studying and the context where that
genre functions: for example, a university course, a business, a health clinic,
a community center, a government office, or some other context.
2 What have you noticed about the textual features (e.g., structural moves
and lexicographical elements) of this genre?
3 What would you like to find out about the genre’s context (or the
context’s human members) that could help you understand the genre, its
textual features, uses, and/or the impact on its users?
4 What qualitative methods could you use to collect data to help you find
this out?
98 ESP genre analysis

5 Select one of the people from the context whom you might interview.
What questions would you ask him or her about the context?
6 What opportunities would you have to engage in participant or non-
participant observations of the context?
7 What other data would you like to collect about the genre to give you
emic (insider) perspectives on how it operates?
8 How do you imagine that your data might triangulate or crystallizate
around certain patterns?

Option B: planning a critical textography

1 Think of a genre you are interested in studying and the context where that
genre functions: for example, a university course, a business, a health clinic,
a community center, a government office, or some other context.
2 Who has power in that context? (It could be more than one type of
participant)
3 What genres are influenced by the power relationships in that context?
(For example, do the more powerful participants establish standards for a
particular genre? Are those with less power able to participate fully and
successfully in the genre, or not?)
4 To what extent do the ways that the genre is used and evaluated in that
context serve (or not) the interests of those with less power in the
context?
5 Whom would you interview or observe in that context to explore its
power dynamics and how they have evolved over time?
6 How comfortable or uncomfortable would you be with doing a study
where your goals are to critique the context’s power dynamics and be an
advocate for those affected by them?

This chapter has considered what studying contexts reveals about genres,
including reasons behind their textual features, individuals’ motivations and
strategies for participating in them, their relationships to other genres, their
effects on their contexts, and—particularly in critical ethnographies—their
connection to power issues in the context. You also learned about several
qualitative methods for conducting ethnographies and textographies of
contexts.
This chapter wraps up Part II of the book, on ESP genre analysis. Part III
now turns to applications of genre analysis for ESP genre-based teaching and
genre learning.
Part III

ESP genre-based learning and

teaching

Part III of this book explores genre-based teaching and student learning in
ESP contexts. As you will see in the next few chapters, much ESP instruction
asks students to analyze genre moves, lexicogrammar, and contexts, with
the goal of helping them become more conscious and effective genre users.
Thus, the genre analysis techniques you learned in the Part II will be
important touchstones for the teaching applications in the upcoming chapters.
Chapter 5 begins by reviewing research on the usefulness of genre-based
teaching. It then addresses considerations involved in designing an ESP
genre-based course, including needs and rights analysis, the role of critical
pedagogy, and overall course structures. Chapter 6 turns to more micro-
aspects of genre-based teaching, focusing on how to select and/or create
texts and classroom activities that promote genre learning. Chapter 7, the
final chapter, looks to future domains for ESP genre research and teaching,
including the study of playful genres and ways this may help students learn
to adaptively transfer their genre knowledge to new situations. As in Part II,
these next chapters provide you with multiple opportunities to practice
implementing the concepts discussed.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 5

Designing genre-based courses

This chapter focuses on how to design a genre-based course. With the term
genre-based, I refer to instruction that explicitly attends to genre concepts
and genre analysis in order to help students become more effective genre
participants in their target contexts. The chapter begins by considering evi-
dence that such instruction facilitates students’ genre learning. It then turns
to processes of creating a genre-based course, including analysis of students’
‘needs’ and ‘rights’ and consideration of how ‘wide-angle’, ‘narrow-angle’,
and/or ‘critical’ a course may be. The latter portion of the chapter explores
four genre-based course designs (genre-focused, theme-focused, project-
focused, and site-focused) and ways that each can address course goals and
student interests.

The role of instruction in genre learning

Although studies assessing the impact of genre-based instruction on student
learning have been relatively few (Cheng 2006), available research indicates
that such teaching can enhance learning. Tardy (2006), in fact, in her
extensive review of genre learning scholarship, identified classroom instruc-
tion as one of multiple factors that builds students’ genre knowledge and
skills. Several studies published after Tardy’s review also demonstrate that
genre-based teaching improves students’ performance in specific genres as
well as their general rhetorical awareness of how genres work. I outline the
findings of several of these investigations below.
Regarding specific genre performance, Pang (2002) found that students
wrote better film reviews after receiving direct instruction about this genre.
This positive effect was found across two groups of first-year Hong Kong
undergraduates, one group receiving “textual analysis” instruction and the
other group receiving “contextual awareness building” instruction (pp. 151–
152). The textual analysis group analyzed moves, evaluative vocabulary, and
verb tenses in sample film reviews, while the contextual awareness-building
group examined the film reviews’ purposes and audiences. Quality comparisons
of the film reviews that students wrote pre- and post-instruction showed
102 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

that both groups improved in their film review writing performance after the
instruction, suggesting that linguistic- and context-oriented genre teaching
can each be beneficial. Similarly, Yasuda (2011) discovered that in a Japanese
college EFL course, genre analysis and production activities on the email
genre led students to produce emails that were more appropriate, organized,
and linguistically sophisticated than emails they wrote at the beginning of
the course. Focusing on listening performance in the lecture genre, Zare and
Keivanloo-Shahrestanaki (2017) also found that EFL course instruction
regarding ‘importance markers’ in English-medium lectures improved the
listening comprehension abilities of Iranian medical students.
Research also points to genre-based teaching’s positive effects on students’
overall rhetorical consciousness. Cheng (2007, 2008), for instance, in his
study of a Chinese international student (Fengshen), observed that RA analysis
tasks (in Cheng’s EAP course) helped Fengshen to understand “influences of
disciplinary practices on move patterns and the roles of voice, argument,
and stance in academic writing” (2008, p. 65). In this way, as Fengshen
indicated in his textual annotations and interviews with Cheng, the genre-
based course led him to become a more “writerly reader” and “readerly
writer,” one who was able to reflect on why writers (including himself)
make certain rhetorical choices (Cheng, 2008, p. 67; 2007, p. 304). Negretti
and Kuteeva (2011) similarly observed that through comparison tasks on RA
genre features, Swedish undergraduate ESP students developed “metacognitive
awareness” of RA strategies, which they sometimes were able to apply to
their own writing (p. 107). And in a Turkish university EFL course, Yayli
(2011) found that textual analysis and production activities helped students
to develop a conscious rhetorical orientation to various genres, even those
not covered in the class. One of the students (Fatih), for example, remarked
that the class instruction about purpose, context, and audience in email
messages “was like a revolution to me … I started to do all writings and
readings with these new concepts in my mind” (p. 127).
These studies thus indicate that genre-based instruction can help students
become skillful and aware genre participants. It is also important to
acknowledge, however, that classroom teaching is necessarily only one con-
tributor to students’ genre learning. Indeed, 47 out of the 60 studies in
Tardy’s (2006) review examined ways that students gained genre knowledge
in “natural (i.e., non-manipulated) settings,” such as job and internship sites,
or discipline-specific mentoring environments (p. 82). In these ‘practice-based’
contexts, as Tardy called them, several factors were crucial to students’
genre learning, including intentional or unintentional exposure to genre
models, practice using genres, and spoken interactions with expert genre
users. In this reality, an ESP course would only be one of many elements
that might shape students’ genre development.
It is with such a measured, though still positive, outlook on genre-based
teaching, that I turn now to how to put together a genre-based course,
 Designing genre-based courses 103

beginning first with needs analysis. Before going there, I would also like to
note that most classroom learning studies have only assessed short-term
effects of genre-based instruction on students, leaving their long-term impact
largely unexplored (Henry & Roseberry, 1998; Tardy, 2006). This possible
future area for ESP genre research is considered in Chapter 7.

Needs and rights analysis

Needs analysis has been a hallmark (and perhaps the hallmark) of ESP
course design. It refers to the process of determining what English knowledge
and skills students need and/or want to develop for their target contexts,
and what they require to get there (Belcher, 2006; Brown, 2016; Dudley-Evans
& St. John, 1998; Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). As Belcher (2006) writes, “It
is probably no exaggeration to say that needs assessment is seen in ESP as
the foundation on which all other decisions are, or should be, made”
(p. 135). In keeping with this orientation, this next section approaches needs
analysis as a first step in designing an ESP genre-based course. It begins by
describing three categories of student needs discussed in ESP scholarship
(target needs, learning needs, and rights), and then considers different
methods for assessing them in terms of genre. This is followed by five
examples of previous needs analyses that each illustrate a particular way of
approaching this process.

Target needs
Target needs are the knowledge(s) and abilities—including those related to
genres—required of students’ target situations, such as their academic pro-
grams, workplaces, or everyday life contexts (Brown, 2016; Dudley-Evans &
St. John, 1998; Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). Sometimes identifying these
target needs or deciding which to foreground in an ESP course is challenging
because different stakeholders—students, teachers, ESP program adminis-
trators, future employers, and others—may have divergent views on what
genres or genre concepts are most important for students to know. For a
group of architecture graduate students, for example, target needs might
include an ability to perform within the spoken ‘design critique’, a genre
common to architecture graduate programs (Swales et al., 2001). In a parti-
cular English for Architecture class, however, students might rather study,
say, architecture research proposals because of a program requirement they
need to pass. Or perhaps their ESP teacher prefers to focus on architecture
lectures and on teaching students to analyze the moves of this genre because
she has seen her students struggle with it. In a situation with such mixed
perspectives, the ESP course designer might adopt what Brown (2016) calls a
“democratic view of needs,” taking into consideration what the “majorities
of all stakeholder groups … want, desire, expect” (p. 13). With this
104 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

democratic approach, a needs analyst for the English for Architecture course
could determine that several target genres warrant some attention in the
course.

Learning needs
ESP needs analysis also takes into consideration students’ learning needs,
that is, the resources, processes, and activities needed for students to learn
the target material (Brown, 2016; Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998; Hutch-
inson & Waters, 1987). Among the first to emphasize a ‘learning-centered’
approach to ESP, Hutchison and Waters (1987) emphasize that “[w]e cannot
simply ‘assume’ that describing and exemplifying what people do with
language will enable someone to learn it” (p. 14). Rather, students may
require particular conditions to grasp, retain, and apply the content pre-
sented in the classroom. To identify what these conditions are involves, as
Brown (2016) points out, “examining issues like the selection and ordering
of the course content,” teaching methods and materials, and “the types of
activities students will engage in” (p. 24). In our English for Architecture
course, for instance, the ESP course designer might find students’ learning
needs to include opportunities to analyze the target genres; step-by-step gui-
dance in composing within the target genres; interesting visual and audio
materials; practice with presenting spoken design critiques; and activities
involving fun and humor. And because each individual student connects
with material in his/her own ways, learning needs for any ESP course can be
quite diverse.

Student rights
In addition to thinking about target and learning needs, some ESP
researchers have emphasized that we ought as well to consider students’
rights, a concept associated with critical English for Academic Purposes
(EAP) (Belcher, 2006; Benesch, 2001a, 2001b; Helmer, 2013; Pennycook,
1997; Starfield, 2013). Like critical ethnographic approaches discussed in
Chapter 4, critical EAP is concerned with power hierarchies and social jus-
tice, and, as such, seeks to help teachers and students not only to understand
external target requirements but also to expose and push back against those
requirements that hurt students. Within this framework, Benesch (2001a), a
critical EAP proponent, has defined rights in terms of exploring students’
potential to negotiate target expectations and to change those that do not
serve their interests. As she states, “rights analysis allows for the possibility
of challenging and transforming unreasonable and inequitable arrangements”
(p. 108).
Benesch (2001a) describes how she attended to student rights in her own
experience teaching an EAP writing course linked to an undergraduate
 Designing genre-based courses 105

psychology course. She learned from some students in her class that
the psychology professor’s lecture-heavy teaching approach was not con-
ducive to their learning because they wanted more time to discuss the
material. To help them assert these learning preferences, Benesch encour-
aged them to ask more questions during lectures (i.e., negotiating a right),
which the students did, leading the class to become somewhat more parti-
cipatory. Of course, in some contexts, target needs and expectations may
make it difficult for students to assert a right that runs counter to these
expectations or to try to meet them in unconventional ways. This tension
between needs and rights is something that ESP practitioners wrestle with as
they attempt to design courses that serve students’ interests. Tardy (2009)
acknowledges this tension in her own genre-based teaching, stating, “The
biggest challenge that remains for me as a writing instructor has been to
balance the need to help my students write in ways that are deemed appro-
priate and successful within various social groups with the need to help my
students manipulate, break, and change genres and the power relationships
embedded in them” (p. 282).
The next section describes methods for identifying students’ needs and
rights, both of which I include under the umbrella of needs analysis.

How to do a needs analysis for a genre-based course

To determine needs, it is important to collect data and not rely solely on
your own or others’ intuitions of what students need or want, which may be
inaccurate (Long, 2005; Jasso-Aguilar, 2005). For a genre-based course, these
data should ideally come from various stakeholders interested in the students’
genre development, in order to ensure a balanced, triangulated, and/or
crystallizated (see Chapter 4) profile of students’ needs and interests (Long,
2005). Table 5.1 lists a number of data collection methods that a genre-
based course designer might use to identify students’ target genre needs
(i.e., what genres and aspects of these genres students need to or want to
know), their learning needs, and their rights. In the section on rights, the
focus is on gathering data that illumine the ‘room’ students have (or not)
to resist aspects of the target genres, and the consequences for them and
others of doing so. Also included in the table are possible measurements of
students’ current knowledge, which can help course designers decide what
material is less relevant to cover (that is, if students already know it). For
description of other needs analysis data sources, see Long (2005) and
Brown (2016).
As you review the lists in this table, you may recall that you have prac-
ticed several of these methods, including text analyses, interviews, and
observations, in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. In fact, assessing students’ target genre
needs, learning needs, and rights draws heavily on genre and context analysis
techniques we have already covered.
106 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Table 5.1 Some possible data for assessing students’ genre needs and rights
Needs and rights Data sources
Target genre needs • Textual analysis of genres students need to know
in their target contexts, including the genres’
purposes, moves, and lexicogrammatical features
• Interviews/surveys with expert informants (e.g.,
faculty and employers) about the genres in the
target context and the functions they serve
• Previously published findings on the target genres
• Participant or non-participant observation of the
target contexts and of uses of genres within these
contexts
• Interviews/surveys with students about what
genres they are interested in learning and why
Current genre knowledge • Written or spoken diagnostic tests related to the
target genres
• Role-plays measuring students’ ability to perform
target genres
• Interviews/surveys with students about what they
already know about the target or related genres
• Interviews/surveys with faculty, employers, and
previous instructors of the course about students’
current genre knowledge
Classroom learning needs • Interviews/surveys with students about their
learning styles, instructional preferences, and
class activities they enjoy
• Journals students keep about learning from class
tasks and which ones they value most
• Observations of how students respond to
different class activities and assignments
• Interviews with past instructors about methods
and activities students find engaging
Genre rights • Analysis of variation allowed in the target genres
across different exemplars and situations
• Interviews with expert informants and
instructors about openness to students departing
from conventions of the target genres
• Interviews with students about target genre
features they feel comfortable participating in or
resisting, and why

Examples of needs analysis

A number of ESP needs analyses illustrate ways of collecting and using data
like those described in Table 5.1. I briefly describe five such analyses below,
each of which has particular emphases, research methods, and outcomes
that could apply to a needs analysis for a genre-based course. These five
examples may give you ideas for doing a needs analysis of your own.
 Designing genre-based courses 107

Basturkmen (2010): identifying target and learning needs through

multiple methods
In designing an English for Police course, Basturkmen (2010) and her colleagues
conducted a multi-method, triangulated needs analysis of New Zealand
police officers, many of whom were non-native English speakers. The
researchers assessed the officers’ target needs by interviewing a senior offi-
cer about genres the officers had to use, examining samples of those genres,
and observing first-hand the officers’ language use by doing ‘ride-alongs’
with them on their patrols. In addition, regarding their learning needs, the
course developers gathered feedback from the officers about what language
learning and teaching styles they preferred. They also ascertained the offi-
cers’ current genre and general English knowledge through language pro-
ficiency tests and interviews with them. From these data, the course
developers identified several facts that guided their priorities for the English
for Police course:

 The police officers had to speak English in stressful situations and

sometimes had difficulties with English pronunciation when speaking
under pressure.
 They had not yet mastered particular features of written police genres.
Junior officers, for example, often used vague language in reports that
needed to be more precise, especially as these reports were used as evidence
in court trials.
 In terms of their learning needs, although they had access to online lessons
and individual tutorials, officers “showed a strong desire for a social form
of learning” with face-to-face classes and a teacher.
(Basturkmen, 2010, p 77)

Task 5.1 Analyzing a target police genre:

suspect description
As noted above, Basturkmen and colleagues identified police officers’ target needs
in part by analyzing samples of genres the officers frequently used. She and her
fellow ESP course designers compiled these samples within a “police language
corpus,” which they also later used in their English for Police course materials
(Basturkmen, 2010, p. 77). This task gives you a chance to analyze one of the
genres in the corpus, a suspect description, attending to what officers would need
in order to perform this sort of text. Read the suspect description below and
then answer the following questions.

Male Caucasian 5 foot 10 inches. About 19 years old. Lean but muscley
build. Blonde hair very short, maybe a number two style cut. Bright red
108 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

hooded sweatshirt with cut off sleeves with ‘Players’ across the chest in
white writing. Dark blue jeans, scruffy looking torn at the bottom.
Wearing black shoes possibly boots. Ethnic design tattoo on right
lower arm.
(from Basturkmen, 2010, p. 79; I added
punctuation for ease of reading)

1 Assuming that this text is a good model of a suspect description, what

would a police officer need to know about the order of moves for
describing a suspect’s appearance? For example, what is described first,
second, and so on?
2 What kinds of vocabulary would officers need to learn for this genre?
3 What other sources of data would you use to check the accuracy of your
answers to 1 and 2 and/or learn more about how suspect descriptions
function in actual police work? In other words, how would you triangulate
your textual observations with other sorts of data?
4 To what extent do you think police officers would have the ‘right’ to resist
or challenge conventions of this genre? Explain your answer.

Louhiala-Salminen (2002): observing a day in the life of a genre user

Taking a different approach to needs analysis, Louhiala-Salminen (2002)
observed one middle manager’s discourse activities on a single day, in order
to identify target needs of international business employees. Specifically, in
this case study approach, she and her research team spent a day ‘shadowing’
a Finnish business manager (“Timo”) in a multinational computer company
to see how he and his colleagues used English and other languages in various
daily communications (pp. 214, 216). They audio-recorded and took obser-
vation notes on Timo’s interactions and phone calls, and collected the
written texts he read or wrote during the day, all of which were email
messages. They then interviewed Timo and other employees the next day to
follow up on their observations. The researchers’ Timo-tracking revealed
that spoken and written genres were “totally intertwined” in Timo’s com-
munications. That is, “many of the phone calls were to confirm an issue in
an e-mail message, e-mail messages referred to phone calls, and they were
constantly discussed in face-to-face communications with colleagues”
(p. 217). And amid their many textual interactions, employees frequently
code-switched between English and Finnish (and sometimes Swedish).
From this snapshot of one businessman’s daily discourse behavior,
Louhiala-Salminen was able to gain a sense of the multiple, intersecting
texts business managers need to negotiate. She also concluded that the pace
of daily business communications is rapid, with little time “to do outlining,
planning, or drafting” (p. 226).
 Designing genre-based courses 109

Downey Bartlett (2005): comparing authentic and inauthentic genre exemplars

Another way to identify target genre needs is by comparing real and false
representations of them. Downey Bartlett (2005) offered such a comparison
for a particular ‘service encounter’ genre that many people engage in on a
regular basis: ordering coffee. She recorded, transcribed, and analyzed 168
real coffee orders at two cafés and one coffee cart, all in the U.S. She then
contrasted these naturally occurring, authentic genre exemplars with ficti-
tious food and beverage service encounters in ESL textbooks. Through this
comparison, Downey Bartlett was able to pinpoint genre knowledge needed
for performing a coffee order that was not reflected in the made-for-
textbook dialogues. The following three service encounter examples from
her study—the first from an ESL textbook, and the other two from her café
recordings—illustrate several revealing differences between authentic and
inauthentic food/drink orders; see if you can notice what they are.
Textbook service encounter (A is the server; B and C are customers)

A What can I get for you?

B I’d like a chicken sandwich and a cup of coffee, please.
C I want a cheeseburger. Let’s have some French fries.
B Good idea
A Would you like any dessert?
C Let’s have some apple pie.
B Oh yes!
(From Denman, 2000, p. 49, cited in Downey
Bartlett, 2005, p. 333)

Naturally occurring service encounter 1 ((.) signifies a pause; S is the server;

C is the customer)

S Morning. What can I get for you?

C Yeah good morning (.) yeah, can I get a—? Let’s see (.) grande coffee of
the day with whipped cream and your little small coffee.
S The tall?
C No the small
S The short?
C Yeah, the shortie
S Grande and a short?
C Exactly

Naturally occurring service encounter 2

S Out of five. 6 cents is your change. Need your receipt?

C Can I take one of your tuna salads?
110 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

S Anything else?
C No that’ll do it. Thanks
S That’s gonna be 4.94
(Examples from Downey Bartlett, 2005, pp. 317 and 323)

As Downey Bartlett points out, and as the first example demonstrates,

textbook food-ordering dialogues are often written in unrealistic language
and (overly) complete sentences; real-life coffee orders, by contrast, contain
“structural nonfluencies … (e.g., fillers and incomplete sentences)” and
elliptical grammar, where the listener is expected to fill in the missing
sentence parts (p. 329). In addition, in real orders (unlike in their textbook
representations), the server often presents the customer with multiple
alternatives to respond to. And it is worth noting in the second extract
above that, within these alternatives, some ‘everyday’ vocabulary like tall
and short have specialized meanings that novice coffee orderers may not
know. Through contrasting these authentic text samples with more
‘canned’ textbook dialogues, therefore, Downey Bartlett is able to reveal
a number of things that learners actually need to know in order to
navigate their own coffee orders and possibly other food service encounter
genres.

Benesch (2001a): assessing students’ rights to resist genres

As noted earlier, ESP needs analysis may also include a focus on student
rights. With a rights orientation, the researcher explores when and why
students might challenge target genre demands, along with the con-
sequences (positive or negative) of doing so. Benesch’s (2001a) investigation
of her EAP students’ rights in the psychology lecture was accomplished through
conversations with the professor and students, observations of the psychology
class, and written assignments from her students. From these data, Benesch
found that although the professor did not reduce his lecture coverage to
accommodate more discussion time (as had been requested by the stu-
dents), he allowed the students to ask questions during his lectures and
overall seemed to appreciate their participation, telling Benesch that it
created “a totally different atmosphere, in a positive direction” (Benesch,
2001a, p. 120). From a rights analysis perspective, Benesch showed that it
was possible for these students, at least in a restricted way, to resist and
change their roles in a target genre (academic lecture) in order to address
their own interests. The experience of doing so, Benesch said, “may
encourage [the students] to challenge other unfavorable situations inside
and outside of classrooms” (p. 120). Rights analyses, of course, also have
the potential to illuminate situations where resistance to target expecta-
tions is not met with openness and may in fact have negative repercussions
for students.
 Designing genre-based courses 111

Jasso-Aguilar (2005): going beyond a single stakeholder

This last example illustrates how a needs analysis can be designed to check
or challenge a single stakeholder’s beliefs about students’ needs. Jasso-
Aguilar (2005) succeeded in such a challenge through her study of maids in a
Hawaiian hotel and their English language needs. The hotel’s human
resources department wanted to offer the maids an English course so that
they could make small talk with the guests and show “the company’s
‘aloha’, a strategy geared towards increasing business” (p. 149). Jasso-Aguilar,
through triangulated data collection and analysis, found the hotel’s perceptions
of the maids’ needs to be inaccurate. She conducted participant observation as
a hotel maid herself and interviewed the maids and other hotel personnel.
From these data, she determined that the maids did not in fact need to use
English extensively with hotel guests, nor did they have many opportunities
to do so. Rather, as she observed, “the job of day-shift housekeepers occurs
in solitude … By the time they go up to clean their rooms, most of the
guests have left, and even encounters with the few guests still around do not
require more language than short greetings” (p. 138).
Interestingly, the spoken genre where Jasso-Aguilar observed the maids
needed English most was one that the hotel task force seems not to have
identified: morning group briefings with the head maid. Because these brief-
ings not only covered the maids’ daily work assignments but also were a
space where maids discussed their feelings about the job, they were “poten-
tially very rich situations for language learning and language socialization”
(p. 142). Jasso-Aguilar’s multi-method analysis (including her own partici-
pant observation) painted a more accurate picture of the maids’ English
needs within particular genres. As well, it raised a caution against listening
solely to an institutional stakeholder paying for the ESP course.

Task 5.2 Designing a needs analysis

This task gives you an opportunity to synthesize what you have learned so far
about needs analysis through one of two options:

Option A: evaluating an existing needs/rights analysis

1 Find an ESP course of interest to you, such as a business English class, a

speaking or writing class for a specific discipline or multiple disciplines, or
other specialized English course at a workplace, university, secondary
school, or community center. For ideas, see also Woodrow (2018).
2 Talk to the designers and/or teachers of that course and find out how they
went about determining the topics, materials, and activities to include. Pay
particular attention to methods they used for collecting information on
students’ needs and how that information guided their course design.
112 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

3 In terms of student rights, ask the course designers about the extent to
which their students may question, resist, or change target genre conventions,
and what the effects are of such resistance.
4 Write a paper evaluating how well it seems the course designers’ analysis
methods captured information about students’ target genres, current genre
knowledge, learning needs, and potential to innovate and resist within the
target genres. Make specific recommendations for what other data the
course designers could collect to enhance their analysis, and to check their
intuitions about what the students need.

Option B: planning your own needs/rights analysis

1 Identify a type of ESP course that you would like to teach (e.g., English for
business, writing for engineers, English for flight attendants, English for U.S.
citizenship applications, or other specialized English course).
2 Write a paper describing and justifying the methods you would use to
assess:
a the target genre knowledge required of the students;
b the students’ current genre knowledge (i.e., what they already know
about the target genres or ones similar to them);
c students’ learning needs (i.e., types of teaching/learning styles and
activities that will help them to learn the material);
d possible ‘spaces’ for students to question, resist, or change the target
genres.

3 In writing your paper, consider how you might adapt some of the needs
analysis methods used in the five example analyses discussed in this chapter.
And be specific about how you would apply the methods (for example,
which stakeholders you would interview, what questions you would ask,
what texts you would collect, how you would analyze them, what situations
you would observe, and so on.)

From needs analysis to course design

After gathering information about your students’ needs and interests, you
can begin to design your genre-based course. This next portion of the
chapter turns to this design process, beginning with three questions that ESP
teachers should consider in creating their courses: how narrowly or widely
to focus the course, whether to promote critique of genres, and how to
engage students’ learning. The chapter then describes four genre-based
course designs that respond to these questions and students’ interests in
varied ways.
 Designing genre-based courses 113

How genre-specific should the course be?

Wide-angle vs. narrow-angle

A long-running question in ESP is how broad or narrow an ESP course
should be (Basturkmen, 2010; Belcher, 2006; Bruce, 2005; Hyland, 2002,
2016a; Widdowson, 1983). Wide-angle courses focus on fairly general English
skills, such as would be covered in a course on academic English, whereas
narrow-angle courses are geared for students with specialized English
language needs. If a needs analysis reveals that all of your students are in a
nuclear physics doctoral program, then a narrow-angle course is likely the
way to go. If, however, your students’ target English goals are more varied
or indeterminate, such as with undergraduates from different majors, then a
broader focus may be more appropriate. How wide- or narrow-angle a
course is will likely influence the teacher’s choice of focal genres. An English
for Nurses course, for example, might cover quite field-specific genres, such
as care plans and medical history interviews, while in an undergraduate
writing course for mixed majors, the teacher might focus on critique essays
or multimedia research papers (among others) that involve rhetorical strategies
common to various fields.
One argument in favor of a wide-angle course is that its content applies to
a range of contexts where students may later find themselves. For academic
contexts, however, Hyland (2002) strongly cautions that what we think of as
common linguistic or discoursal features actually manifest quite differently
in particular disciplines. Making the case for keeping the ‘S’ in ESP, Hyland
argues that the notion of academic English “misleads learners into believing
that they simply have to master a set of rules which can be transferred
across fields” (p. 392). Students, he says, also need to understand how genre
‘rules’ are closely tied to beliefs, values, and knowledge-making practices of
individual communities. But what about the mixed student group with a
range of target needs? Here, Hyland suggests that students be assigned to
contrast genres across their respective fields. In this way, a course maintains
its specificity and relevance to each student’s target needs, and at the same
time, “[b]y making contact with those outside their field, students may more
easily come to see that communication does not entail adherence to a set of
universal rules but involves making rational choices based on the ways texts
work in specific contexts” (p. 393). (See also discussion in Hyland, 2016a.)

Genre acquisition vs. genre awareness

Whether you adopt a broad or specific focus for your course depends as well
on whether the goals for your students are aimed at genre acquisition or
genre awareness, categories distinguished by RGS scholars Russell and
Fisher (2009), and also taken up by some in ESP. The narrower of these two
114 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

categories, genre acquisition, involves learning a specific genre so that you

can recognize it and/or reproduce it according to its conventional forms and
functions (Johns 2008, 2015b). The English for Police course described earlier
(Basturkmen, 2010), for example, might help its students acquire several key
police genres, such as the suspect description, and could assess their acqui-
sition by how well they produce such texts in their police work. Genre
awareness, on the other hand, involves more global knowledge about genres—
that is, how they work in general terms, rather than skill in any one parti-
cular genre (Clark & Hernandez, 2011; Devitt, 2009, 2014; Johns, 2008,
2011). Task 5.3 below gives you an opportunity to think about what global
genre awareness might encompass.

Task 5.3 Exploring genre awareness

Think back on what you have learned about genres and genre analysis in the first
four chapters of this book, and do the following:

1 Make a list of general principles that apply to all (or at least most) genres.
Think of this as “general facts about genres” list.
2 Discuss with a partner or write a brief reflection on how you could design
a course that helps students develop awareness of these genre facts, and
speculate on how such awareness would help them to figure out new
genres in any field, workplace, or everyday situation.
3 Comment on whether an ESP course with genre awareness as its goal
could be narrow-angle, wide-angle, or both.

In an ESP course, attention to genre acquisition or to genre awareness

each has its benefits. Regarding acquisition, as students learn more genres,
they are more likely to have relevant knowledge to draw upon in various
contexts (Devitt, 2004, 2007). As Devitt (2007) points out, “Writers with
fuller genre repertoires … can move among different locations—with their
different genres—more easily” (p. 222). In addition, knowing general
principles about genres (e.g., that they have moves, vary across commu-
nities and individuals, and so on) and genre analysis strategies helps stu-
dents approach unfamiliar genres in the future (Beaufort, 2007; Johns,
2008; Wardle, 2007). As Johns (2008) asserts, genre awareness offers indi-
viduals “rhetorical flexibility” to adapt their knowledge to “ever-evolving
contexts” (p. 238). One genre-awareness curriculum aimed at this flex-
ibility is Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi’s (2004) undergraduate writing
textbook, Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres.
Throughout much of the book, the authors emphasize the following gen-
eral guidelines (which I have listed below) for figuring out any genre and
its relationship to its context.
 Designing genre-based courses 115

1 Collect samples of the genre

2 Identify the scene and describe the situation in which the genre is used
(e.g., its setting, topic, participants, purposes)
3 Identify and describe patterns in the genre’s features (e.g., its content,
rhetorical appeals, organization, grammar, words)
4 Analyze what these patterns reveal about the situation and scene (e.g.,
its values reflected in the features, and what participant roles are
encouraged or discouraged)
(Condensed from Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004, pp. 93–94;
for specific questions students consider in each of
these steps, please see their book.)

Such a genre awareness curriculum is in some ways wide-angle, helping

students to develop knowledge and strategies that are applicable across
contexts. Yet it can also be narrow-angle in the specific genres selected to
teach genre principles. Johns (2015b) and colleagues, for instance, developed
a curriculum for secondary school students that focuses on the specific genre
of college application essays—a very relevant genre for the students’ target
needs—yet the course also had broader genre sensitivity goals, including
attention to audience and individual writer personas. Thus, in answer to the
question we began this section with of How specific should the course be?,
we might say that a genre-based ESP course can be both narrow and wide,
acquisition-oriented and awareness-oriented, although it may lean further
toward one end or the other of each of these two continua depending on
teacher and student preferences.

How critical should the course be of its genres?

Another running question for at least some ESP practitioners is how critical
the course should be of the genres that it teaches. Critical EAP, mentioned
earlier in the section on rights, promotes curricula where students question
and critique genres that do not serve students’ interests academically, eco-
nomically, politically, or otherwise, and/or that perpetuate unfair power
hierarchies in universities or larger societies (Benesch, 1993, 1996, 2001a,
2009; Chun, 2009; Helmer, 2013; Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005; Pennycook,
1997; Starfield, 2013). As Benesch (2001a) writes, “In addition to preparing
students for current and future academic assignments, a worthy but insufficient
goal, [critical EAP] keeps open the possibility that students might view these
assignments as unreasonable, poorly conceptualized, unclear and so on”
(p. 61). Without allowing for critical views of academic discourses, argues
Benesch (1993), traditional EAP approaches are problematically “accom-
odationist,” endorsing “current power relations in academia and society”
that may “limit the participation of nonnative-speaking students in academic
culture” (pp. 711, 713). Similarly, Pennycook (1997) has linked traditional
116 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

EAP with “vulgar pragmatism” (p. 256, using a term from Cherryholmes,
1988), because it serves an efficiency-driven goal of helping students learn
dominant genres without questioning the potentially damaging politics and
ethics of this enterprise.
You might wonder what could possibly be harmful about acquiring status
quo genres in academic disciplines or professions. Critical EAP scholars
have pointed to several areas of concern. Pennycook (1997), for example,
has suggested that teaching academic English is not a neutral enterprise,
given that English “is deeply bound up with international capitalism and
tourism” as well as “the spread of particular forms of culture”, which serve
the interests of some at the expense of others (p. 258). Or as Belcher (2006)
notes, critical pedagogy experts may see conventional EAP “as a form of
domination, supporting the spread of English, and thus strengthening, in
EFL settings, the hold of the developed world on the less developed”
(p. 143). At a more local level, critical EAP scholarship has considered ways
that academic genres potentially marginalize students in their degree programs.
Casanave (1995), for example, found that in a U.S. sociology graduate pro-
gram, the research and theory paper assignments, as well as the professors’
lectures, alienated the ethnic minority and international students, who felt
that these texts did not prepare them to serve their own cultural commu-
nities. Outside of academic contexts as well, institutionalized genres have
been critiqued for their diminishment of certain perspectives and realities.
Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi (2004), for instance, observe that the Patient
Medical History Form (PMHF), a prominent genre in the U.S. medical
world, constructs patients and their illnesses in terms of only their physical
symptoms, rather than also their emotional and mental states, and in doing
so, “limits the extent to which [patients] can be treated” (p. 151)

Three views of critical pedagogy in genre-based courses

Although critical EAP scholarship has increased in prominence (see Starfield’s
2013 review of the “critical turn” in ESP, p. 463), orientations to it have not
been uniform. Below I outline three perspectives on critical pedagogy, citing
the views of scholars under each. I would also like to emphasize, however, that
individual researchers often occupy more than one position at different times
or sometimes simultaneously depending on their teaching situation. Indeed,
in designing your own genre-based course, you might find yourself interested
in several of these stances.

VIEW 1: EMPOWERMENT THROUGH LEARNING (NOT RESISTING) GENRES

The default position of much ESP teaching has been fairly ‘non-critical’.
That is, ESP courses have focused mainly on helping students acquire target
genres rather than on encouraging them to reflect on, be critical of, or resist
 Designing genre-based courses 117

genres that support oppressive hierarchies or have negative consequences for

individuals or communities. Underlying this default view is a belief that, at
least in academic and professional contexts, students are best served, and
even empowered, through learning the standard genres of their future areas
of study and work. In EAP, Santos (2001) has expressed a strong version of
this view, writing, “I certainly find nothing ethically disgraceful in helping
students accommodate to, or assimilate to, the dominant academic dis-
courses because I regard this as essential for academic success” (p. 183). In
supporting her position, Santos says that she has never heard of students
wanting to take an “oppositional stance” to academic discourse, and there-
fore “it seems rather presumptuous to insist [such resistance] would be of
much greater benefit to them” (p. 183). Reading through leading ESP journals,
one gathers that Santos’ perspective is shared, even if not explicitly stated as
so, by many ESP researchers, given that their articles focus on explicating
and teaching target genres without much critical reflection on the outcomes
they enable.

VIEW 2: CRITICAL AWARENESS OF GENRES AND THEIR EFFECTS

Other ESP practitioners advocate raising students’ awareness of the political

effects (including negative ones) of genres, and at the same time letting stu-
dents decide what to do with that critical awareness. Harwood and Hadley
(2004) embrace such a view within what they call “Critical Pragmatic EAP”
(p. 357). One way they enact this approach is through corpus-based lessons
showing students the types of linguistic variation and norm-breaking that is
possible in academic genres. Students then consider how they feel about
either following or flouting genre norms and the consequences of doing so.
These reflections may then help them decide on whether and when to
assimilate or eschew mainstream discourse practices. Also taking a similar
approach, some ESP and RGS practitioners suggest encouraging students to
ask critically pointed questions of any genres that they encounter, such as
What types of communications does this genre facilitate or constrain?,
Whom does this genre include or exclude from participation?, What values
does it embody?, Whose interests does it serve?, and What actions does it
make possible or make difficult? (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004; Devitt,
2014; Johns, 2011). Through such heuristics, students develop habits of
mind for exploring the ethical consequences of genres, and can then decide
what to do with the information they discover.

VIEW 3: RESISTING AND CHANGING GENRES AND THEIR CONTEXTS

On the most ‘critical end’ of the critical ESP spectrum are approaches that
encourage students to resist and change genres that they perceive are harmful
to themselves or to others (Benesch, 2001a, 2001b; Canagarajah, 2006;
118 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Devitt, 2014; Pennycook, 1997; see also review by Starfield, 2013). In her
undergraduate writing classes, Devitt (2014), for example, assigns students
to write letters requesting revisions to institutionalized genres, including
letters “to advertisers asking them to change their form of advertising, to
newspapers asking them to allow more variation in wedding announce-
ments, and to university officials asking them to change the depiction of
their majors in brochures” (p. 156). While these actions, says Devitt, do not
fully address “the complexity or reality of power in our worlds,” they give
students experience with challenging status quo genres, “creat[ing] an
opening for students to realize that what has always been is not what must
always be” (p. 156). In a similar vein, Canagarajah (2006) recommends
encouraging students to consider how they might change textual conventions
“to suit their interests, values, and identities” (p. 603).
Some ESP scholars, however, have cautioned that challenging genre norms
is not always feasible for students. Grujicic-Alatriste (2013), for example,
asserts that because genres “are supported by powerful interests,” students
may be limited in how much they can change “established forms” and may
face negative consequences or even job loss when they try to exercise such
changes (p. 462). RGS scholar Elizabeth Wardle (2009) also recommends that,
in encouraging students to critique genres, university writing teachers should
be careful that such critique is not itself stressful or confusing for students.
She writes, “[T]o the extent [students] have the power and authority to
change academic genres to better meet their needs, we should help them
understand how to do so … [But] we must be certain that our analytical
genre work will help them succeed, not paralyze them with doubts” (p. 783).

Task 5.4 Defining your own view of critical EAP

1 Which of the three orientations toward critical genre pedagogy described
above (and listed again below) resonate with you as a current or future
teacher? Why?
 Empowerment through learning (not resisting) genres.
 Critical awareness of genres and their effects.
 Resisting and changing genres and their contexts.
2 Could you see yourself combining these perspectives in designing a genre-
based course? Explain.

How can the course facilitate student learning?

Along with how wide or narrow, critical or accommodationist a genre-
based course ought to be, a third key question for a course designer is what
material will engage students and motivate them to learn. Indeed, the needs
 Designing genre-based courses 119

analysis process discussed earlier is a first step in addressing this question,

helping the designer determine what genres students will find relevant for
their goals. It is also important to keep in mind that just because some part
of your course meets a target need, it will not necessarily inspire students to
learn without also making the learning process engaging. As Hutchison and
Waters (1987) put it plainly (p. 48),

[I]f your students are not fired with burning enthusiasm by the obvious
relevance of their ESP materials, remember that they are people not
machines. The medicine of relevance may still need to be sweetened
with the sugar of enjoyment, fun, creativity and a sense of achievement.

I briefly suggest here two ways to “sweeten” a genre-based course design to

promote learning. One is to focus not only on target genres but also on non-
target genres that add variety and entertainment while still illustrating impor-
tant genre principles. In a narrow-angle class for, say, urban planning master’s
students, a teacher could weave in such genres as TED Talks, apartment
advertisements, and online dating profiles to complement and even illuminate
the more ‘serious’ urban planning genres in the course. (See also Johns’ (1997,
2015a) recommendations for using ‘homely’ genres in EAP courses.) A related
way to create a motivating course design is to give students a say in its structure
(Belcher, 2006; Nation & Macalister, 2010). Yayli (2011), for example, colla-
borated with her Turkish university EAP undergraduate students to identify
five genres of interest for her course: informational essays, argumentative
essays, curriculum vitaes, email messages, and recipes. A negotiated syllabus
(Nation & Macalister, 2010) like this can not only increase students’ invest-
ment in learning in the course but also provide the teacher with ongoing feed-
back about students’ preferences and learning needs—especially important
given that “instructors are not always good judges of what will interest and
motivate their own students” (Belcher, 2006, p. 139).

Four genre-based course designs

This next section presents four genre-based course designs and considers how
each may address the design issues we have covered regarding students’ needs
and rights, wide and narrow course focuses, critical pedagogy, and student
learning. Rather than strict templates, these four designs—genre-focused,
theme-focused, project-focused, and site-focused—are flexible course-creation
strategies that can be readily mixed and matched in a single course.

Genre-focused courses
Although all genre-based courses are in some ways genre-focused, I am
using this label here for courses organized explicitly around specific genres.
120 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

This style of curriculum is seen, for instance, in Feak, Reinhart, and Rohlk’s
(2009) EAP speaking textbook Academic Interactions: Communicating on
Campus. A number of their chapters center on and, in fact, are named after
interactive academic genres that university students need to engage in—
email messages, office hours meetings, classroom discussions, and panel
presentations. A similar approach is seen in Gimenez’s (2011) English for
nursing textbook, Writing for Nursing and Midwifery Students, which has
sections focused on such genres as care critiques, reflection papers, action
plans, and research proposals. Shulman’s (2006) In Focus: Strategies for
Business Writers also has units with genre-centric titles like “The Concise
Memorandum,” “The Strategic Business Plan,” and “The Professional
Presentation.”
In terms of specificity, a genre-focused course is, by definition, aimed at
helping students acquire knowledge of and skill in specific genres. In this
way it serves narrow-angle goals. At the same time, though, while teaching
these specific genres, such a course can be wide-angle in building students’
overall awareness of genres as means for achieving social actions. As Devitt
(2014) points out, “Analyzing the contexts and features of a new genre pro-
vides an inroad to understanding all genres” (p. 152). Varied stances
regarding critical pedagogy are also possible within a genre-focused course.
An instructor, for example, may teach students to accommodate to parti-
cular target genre conventions, or s/he can take a more critical approach,
raising ethical consciousness about certain genres and their effects. Or as
illustrated in Feak, Reinhart, and Rohlk’s (2009) Academic Interactions
textbook, accommodationist and critical approaches can be combined. This
book—pragmatically—familiarizes students with conventions of spoken
academic genres, but at the same time it offers students strategies for
asserting their interests within potentially marginalizing genres. In the unit
on classroom discussions, for example, students learn verbal and non-verbal
means of taking the floor even when it means interrupting the current
speaker. As the authors advise students,

You may need to be persistent in order to get a turn. If you always wait
until there is a long pause, until someone takes a breath, or until you
think someone has completely finished a sentence, you may never get a
chance to speak.
(Feak, Reinhart, & Rohlk, 2009, p. 160, underlining in original)

Task 5.5 Sequencing in a genre-focused course

In organizing a genre-focused course like those described above, the course
designer must determine how to order the specific genres in the course. Hyland
(2007) suggests several factors to consider in creating a course’s genre
 Designing genre-based courses 121

sequence: 1) the urgency of the genres in terms of addressing students’ needs,

2) the level of difficulty of the genres, and 3) the natural order in which the
genres occur and interact in the real world.
This task gives you practice applying these considerations in ordering a set of
genres for an ESP course. The course is for graduate students and focuses on the
“supporting genres” of academic writing, as described in Swales and Feak’s (2011)
EAP writing textbook Navigating Academia. These supporting genres are often
“occluded” (Swales, 1996). That is, they are “rarely part of the public record” and
thus without available models, but are nonetheless important for academic
careers (Swales, 1996, p. 46). Below is a list of a number of such genres that
Swales and Feak cover in their book, but presented here in scrambled order.

 Responses to reviewers and editors

 Statements of purpose
 Email requests, reminders, and apologies to peers, advisors, and colleagues
in the field
 Acknowledgements in journal articles, theses, or dissertations
 Article manuscript submissions to journals
 Curriculum vitae (CVs)
 Author biostatements in journal articles
 Job applications
 Personal statements (e.g., like those required for PhD program applications
in the U.S.)
 Letters of recommendation (that one is asked to write for students or
colleagues)
 Statements of teaching philosophy
 Small grant applications

1 Without looking at Swales and Feak’s table of contents, list these genres in
an order that would make sense in a course for graduate ESP students.
Relate your order to one or more of Hyland’s (2007) criteria for genre
sequencing a) most-to-least urgently needed, b) least-to-most difficult, and
c) natural ordering they occur with respect to each other. Justify why your
sequence would work well for the course.
2 In their textbook, Swales and Feak group the genres above into several
categories. How would you group these genres and what headings would
you use for these categories?
3 If possible, after completing steps 1 and 2, look at the table of contents of
Swales and Feak’s book, and compare these authors’ ordering and grouping
with yours. Which do you like better and why?
4 Now think of another ESP course you would be interested in teaching. List
the genres you could center the course around, and explain the order you
would put them in and why.
122 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Theme-focused courses
Another way to organize a genre-based course is around themes (Hyland,
2004b). In such a design, each course unit revolves around a particular topic,
with genres, as well as other elements related to the topic, embedded along
the way. One example of a theme-organized curriculum is Shawcross’ (2011)
Flightpath, an aviation English textbook for pilots and air traffic control
officers. As reflected in a number of the chapter titles below, most of the
book is structured around aviation-situation topics:

Ground movements
Runway incursions
Environmental threats
Decision making
Approach and landing incidents
Handling a technical malfunction

Within each of these, Shawcross’ materials address topical issues the

aviation specialist must deal with, along with “communicative functions”
(p. 4) (including specific genres) needed in particular situations and language
features linked with those functions. The chapter on the theme of environ-
mental threats, for example, includes an exercise on aviation weather
reports transmitted through the Automatic Terminal Information Service
(ATIS). For this exercise, students have to listen to two examples of this
genre, identify what information seems to be mandatory and optional (e.g.,
visibility, precipitation, temperature, dew point, wind velocity), and what
order these informational moves occur in (although Shawcross does not
explicitly refer to them as moves).
One benefit of such a theme-based design is that it readily accommodates
multiple elements, including but not limited to genres. Shawcross’ text, for
instance, weaves in aviation genres amid information on aircraft-threatening
conditions (e.g., windshear, icing, volcanic ash), aviation-related vocabulary
exercises, and listening practice with air traffic control radio transmissions.
Thus, for student groups who need coverage of topical content, language
skills practice, and genres for a particular field or profession, a theme-based
design offers a useful umbrella for all of these. Another advantage of this
course type is its potential to motivate students with engaging themes. In my
own undergraduate writing course for multilingual students, for example, I
select topics that students find interesting and fun—such as romantic love—
and in assignments on these topics, students gain experience with reading
and composing in various genres. In one unit, for example, on the theme of
biological perspectives on romance, students read popular and scholarly
articles, watch a film portraying an arranged marriage (The Namesake,
based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri), and listen to a radio broadcast on
 Designing genre-based courses 123

neurological love chemicals. They also write a “chemical love story” (a

hybrid playful genre, which I describe more fully in Chapter 7) and an
empirical-style research report on a love-related topic of their choice.
Besides allowing teachers the freedom to choose interesting topics and
texts, a theme-based approach is flexible enough to promote narrow-angle
genre acquisition, through practice with producing specific text types related
to the theme, and/or wide-angle genre awareness. Indeed, a course’s theme
may even be genre awareness, as is reflected in some undergraduate writing
textbooks like Wardle and Downs’ (2017) Writing about Writing and Devitt,
Reiff, and Bawarshi’s (2014) Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with
Genres.

Project-focused courses
A project-focused design is one in which all elements, including genres and
themes, cohere around a unifying project that students in the course complete
individually, in small groups, or as a whole class. Possibilities for such pro-
jects are many. A course might be centered around students developing, for
example, an online magazine, a marketing campaign, an employee safety
workshop, a documentary film, a health education fair, or another project.
This design is not mutually exclusive with genre-focused or theme-focused
approaches. The difference is that in a project-focused course, the genre
work and thematic content are always in service to the overarching project.
This synthetic quality of project-focused courses is something that makes
them appealing to both students and teachers. Because the individual
assignments in the course are tied to something larger, they can be more
meaningful than a series of discrete tasks with different purposes. Also,
when a class project involves producing something of value for a real-world
audience, students are often motivated to give it their all and can achieve
much personal satisfaction in seeing it through to completion.
Project-focused designs have substantial precedent in second language
teaching (Beckett & Miller, 2006; Herbolich, 1979; Stoller, 2002). One of the
earlier documented ESP project-based curricula was Herbolich’s (1979)
engineering English course at the University of Kuwait, where students
completed a “box kite” project, which involved making their own box kites,
writing manuals for how to build one, and launching their kites together
one windy day! Commenting on Herbolich’s work, Swales (1985a) writes
that “it demonstrates that a successful project can generate an educationally
valuable sense of personal satisfaction for all parties involved—something
that is not so easy to achieve in any other way” (p. 131).
More recently, some EAP and L1 English writing courses have incorpo-
rated multimodal projects, integrating print, visual, auditory, and digital
material in a variety of genres (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014; Bowen & Whithaus,
2013; Hafner, 2014; Molle & Prior, 2008). Hafner (2014) describes one
124 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

delightful example of such a project in an English for Science course he over-

saw at City University of Hong Kong. In this course, undergraduate science
and math majors worked in small groups to create documentary videos
posted to YouTube explaining a scientific investigation they had conducted.
Particularly challenging about their project was that they had to explain their
scientific phenomenon in a way that would appeal to a non-specialist online
audience. To this end, one group designed their video in the form of a TV
program reporting on their experiment of how smell affects taste (see “Taste
Me if You Can!” posted by user en2251 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
8-1FAV1_VTg). This project was genre instructive in that it engaged students
in thinking about, selecting, and mixing features of several genres. In parts of
their video, for example, students integrated television show conventions,
such as a logo for their fictitious “Scientific Channel,” opening credits
accompanied by rock guitar music, and even an end-of-show blooper. Other
sections of the video, on the other hand, incorporated the organizational
structure of scientific RAs, with segments entitled “introduction,” “experi-
mental material and procedure,” “result,” “discussion,” and “conclusion.”
Within these sections, the students also mixed genres and styles. In reporting
on their group’s experimental method, for example, the narrator (dressed as a
scientist in a white lab coat; see Figure 5.1) explained his group’s experiment
on whether smell affected ability to identify jelly bean flavors, mentioning—
like an RA author would—the researchers’ hypothesis and the number and
sex of the experiment’s participants. Departing from RA conventions, however,
the video also showed actual participants blindfolded, holding their noses,
and chewing on jelly beans—a display of ‘on the ground’ research processes
not captured in written academic reports (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.1 “Taste me if you can!” (screenshot A)

Source: en2251, YouTube (15 Oct. 2009). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
8-1FAV1_VTg.
 Designing genre-based courses 125

Figure 5.2 “Taste me if you can!” (screenshot B)

Source: en2251, YouTube (15 Oct. 2009). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=
8-1FAV1_VTg.

In engaging students in such synthetic, multi-genre work, project-based

courses serve both narrow-angle genre acquisition and wide-angle genre
awareness goals. In Hafner’s curriculum, for example, students gained
experience composing in specific genres (e.g., TV documentary and research
reports) and media, while at the same time they may have become more
generally conscious of how texts work in contexts. Regarding this broader
rhetorical sensitivity, Hafner writes that students had to think about how to
best construct creative documentaries for their viewers. Specifically, they
drew on “the multimodal affordances of digital video and … craft[ed] narra-
tives which they hoped would compel their audience” (p. 679). This process
of crafting multimodal projects with their recipients in mind could also
serve critical pedagogy purposes, leading students to reflect on how parti-
cular media and genres afford or limit the possibilities for communication
and persuasion. A possible extension activity to further these genre awareness
and critical pedagogy goals might ask students to change their documentary
into a formal essay, a blog post, a newspaper editorial and/or a text message,
and discuss how each genre allows or constrains the impact on different
audiences.
Although exciting and motivating for students, a project-focused course
like Hafner’s requires substantial advance work on the part of the instructor.
Hafner (2014) reports that his students were provided with several work-
shops, as well as online technical resources, to assist with different phases of
the documentary project (reading, scripting and storyboarding, performing
and filming, and editing). Other project-focused designs, however, may be
somewhat simpler to implement. My colleague Nancy Best, for example, has
126 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

integrated a multimodal project in her first-year writing course using

Weebly™, a user-friendly website design program (see www.weebly.com).
Through this platform, Best’s students create websites about their individual
academic majors (e.g., biology, theatre arts, criminal justice, and so on)
aimed at audiences of other students who are in their major or who are
considering it. In the process of building their websites, students compose in
(and build several webpages around) a range of genres, including interviews
with faculty in their major fields, informational summaries on career and
graduate school opportunities, frequently-asked-questions lists, and analyses
of journal articles in their major fields. Best reports that her students not
only learn about various genres but also are highly motivated by the website
project, finding it meaningful to research their own fields and to integrate
images, video, and audio creatively in their websites (Best, personal
communication, July 2016).

Site-focused courses
Genre-based courses can also be site-focused, that is, built around ‘real-world’
sites outside of the course itself, such as another course, a workplace, or a
community organization. A key advantage of these courses is that the ‘real-
ness’ and immediacy of the outside site and audience can motivate students to
learn the genres needed for this site. Some site-focused courses overlap with
project-focused designs, as they often require students to produce projects
(e.g., a presentation, a manual, and so on) for their sites. Below, I give an
overview of three site-focused designs that have been discussed in relation to
genre-based teaching: linked courses, service learning, and site simulations.

Linked courses
Linked course designs involve an ESP course connected to another course
that the students are concurrently enrolled in. In such a configuration, the
other course serves as a site motivating much of the work in the ESP course.
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed Benesch’s (2001a) use of critical pedagogy in
EAP courses linked with a psychology course. At San Diego State University,
Johns (1997) has also taught in linked arrangements for first-year under-
graduates enrolled simultaneously in a “literacy” (EAP) course and a general
education (GE) course in a field such as history, geography, or literature
(p. 83). Johns’ literacy course helps the students gain a fuller understanding
of the site genres by asking them to analyze the GE course’s readings, lectures,
and exam and assignment prompts, and to interview the GE course faculty
and upper-level students about the course. In some linked courses, the EAP and
GE faculty may collaborate on their course designs, as did Johns and a history
professor, who drew on each other’s course goals to “co-construct” syllabuses
and develop complementary paper and presentation assignments (Johns,
 Designing genre-based courses 127

1997, p. 143). By giving students practice investigating and using the outside
course’s genres, these linked arrangements can promote both acquisition of
specific genres as well as awareness of how genres are related to the values
and practices of their contexts. Linked configurations can also motivate
students to do well on their ESP assignments, as these are connected to their
success in the site course as well.

Service learning
The focal sites for ESP courses may also be ‘off-campus’. In service learning
designs, for example, students in an ESP or other course contribute service
to an outside-of-school site, such as a business, government agency or com-
munity organization, and reflect on how their service experience relates to
the course. The students’ service work may promote their genre learning as
it engages students in producing texts of various kinds for their sites. Jolliffe
(2001), for example, discusses several service learning courses that did just
that, including a civil engineering course at the University of Utah, where
students write technical traffic-related reports for “governmental bodies and
local organizations that are petitioning for new roadways and traffic patterns”
(p. 100). Jolliffe also describes a service-learning course he teaches in which
undergraduates tutored secondary school students at a public high school
and, from this experience, write texts that address “a real problem involving
urban education that the students have uncovered in their work as a tutor”
(p. 101). These student-produced texts have included a parent manual for
how to start a high school summer reading program, a guide for instructors
with hearing-impaired students, and a website for parents of children with
eating disorders.
Like other site-focused designs, service learning can be highly motivating
to students because of the realness of the contexts for which they are com-
pleting their class assignments. In addition, it allows students to see that
genres (and their own texts within those genres) perform actual work in
their sites, an important wide-angle and critical lesson that they can transfer to
future situations. A civil engineering student who wrote one of those traffic
reports, for example, might discover that it had influenced a city’s trans-
portation policy, or another who created the eating disorder website might
later receive words of gratitude from a struggling parent. Such feedback
from the site can make the course’s genre work particularly meaningful to
students, as they see that it serves real people outside of their ESP course.

Site simulation
Service learning, while potentially very enriching for students, can be a
challenge to set up, particularly if there are limited local sites available and/
or if students lack transportation to off-campus locations. An alternative
128 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

that avoids these logistical challenges is site simulation through a computerized

Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Russell and Fisher (2009) describe one
such VLE that simulated a workplace (and its genres) in a technical commu-
nication course for agricultural and bio-systems engineering undergraduates.
Through software called MyCase, the authors designed a virtual, fictitious
bio-technology company called Omega Molecular, for which the students
served as consultants. For their consulting work, the students read, wrote,
and listened to a variety of genres, including company email messages, a
state-of-the-company report, an investor bulletin for a venture capitalist,
and a speech by the Omega Molecular CEO. What made their work different
from that within a ‘regular’ genre-based course was that the VLE simulated
for the students how genres would flow and interact in a dynamic workplace
context, rather than just presenting the genres one at a time as one might do
in a genre-focused design. For example, when students logged in and “[went]
to work” at Omega Molecular, they read recent emails from fictitious Omega
employees and watched videos of meetings and other events that simulated
current goings-on at the company (p. 171). Moreover, like at a real work-
place, the writing assignments were called “deliverables” (p. 183), and their
deadlines were fluid, posted on a company calendar that changed in response
to situations unfolding in the company’s virtual time and space (Russell &
Fisher, 2009). And by having to draw on these texts at Omega Molecular to
produce their own texts, students again learned how genres interacted with
other genres in the company’s “genre system or ecology” (p. 188).
With respect to critical pedagogy goals, working with genres in a simulated
or actual site exposes students to power dynamics in real-world contexts and
ways genres may respond to (or even change) those dynamics. Russell and
Fisher (2009), for instance, note that in the Omega Molecular simulation,
when students wrote an “investor’s bulletin”, they had to “do so in a com-
municative environment where there [were] contradictory interests and
complex power structures operating in different ‘areas’ of the environment”
(p. 173). Peck, Flower, and Higgins (1995) also report on a dynamics-changing
project in which inner-city Pittsburgh high school students created a “Whassup
with Suspension” newsletter in response to their frustrations with author-
itarian school suspension policies (p. 200). The fact that this newsletter
became “required reading for teachers and students” at a real high school
(p. 200) illustrates how a student genre project can make a critical intervention
for social change in its target site.

Combining course designs

The four course designs described above can be freely combined depending
on students’ needs and interests. A business English course, for instance,
might start out as genre-focused, covering individual texts like memoranda,
strategic business plans, and spoken presentations. It then, though, could
 Designing genre-based courses 129

also include a project where students produce these texts for a real or
hypothetical business site with particular contextual demands. As another
example of design mixing, my theme-focused undergraduate writing class
could, in addition to exploring romantic love topics, spend time on the
conference presentation genre, leading to a final project whereby students
present their romantic-love research papers at a ‘mini-conference’ attended
by faculty, family, and peers. Task 5.6 gives you a chance to consider what
course designs (or combinations thereof) you would be interested in using in
your own ESP class.

Task 5.6 Designing your own genre-based ESP course

Select an ESP student population whose needs and interests you know something
about. Then do the following:

1 Develop a weekly outline for a 15-week (three hours per week) course
you would teach with these students. In your outline, for each week, list
the themes, genres, and assignments you would include.
2 Write a brief paper explaining:
 how your course reflects one or more of the four genre-based course
designs discussed in this chapter (genre-focused, theme-focused, project-
focused, site-focused)
 how narrow-angle or wide-angle your course is in its focuses; here you may
wish to bring in the concepts of genre acquisition and genre awareness
 whether there is room for student input into your course structure
and content and, if so, how the course syllabus would be negotiated
 the orientation your course might take regarding critical pedagogy
 how your course would motivate student learning.

This chapter has covered issues that ESP teachers may consider as they
design a genre-based course that speaks to students’ needs and interests, and
that motivates them to learn. The next chapter continues this exploration of
genre-based teaching, focusing on how to design specific lesson materials for
a course and how to assess the impact of those materials on students’ genre
learning.
Chapter 6

Creating and assessing

genre-based teaching materials

Developing a genre-based ESP course involves not only planning its overall
structure and focus(es) but also selecting and/or constructing lesson materials
that implement your course vision. The importance of these materials
cannot be underestimated. They are a key, if not the key, conduit between
your course goals and student learning. In a genre-based course, materials
provide students with memorable genre examples as well as opportunities to
analyze, critique, and use genres in ways that promote genre acquisition and
genre awareness within and beyond the course. Given their importance, it is
not surprising that designing effective teaching materials takes “considerable
time, resources, and expertise,” especially given that “experienced designers
constantly question and problematize what they are doing” (Harwood, 2010,
pp. 17, 13).
This chapter offers you guidance on how to create and assess genre-based
materials. I will focus on two components that make up such materials: 1)
tasks (also known as activities) and 2) texts. The chapter begins with an
overview of several task types—rhetorical consciousness-raising, text pro-
duction, and process—and discusses why each may facilitate students’ genre
learning within different course designs. I will then consider how to
sequence such tasks within a curricular unit, as well as how to select or
create texts for your tasks, and to evaluate the effects of these materials on
students’ learning. Throughout the chapter, you will have opportunities to
practice designing your own genre-based materials and assessments, and as
you do, to draw on the genre and context analysis techniques you learned in
Chapters 2, 3 and 4. If, in your future teaching, you use pre-existing materials
(such as from other teachers or from published textbooks), this chapter can
still inform how to adapt these materials to fit the focuses of your particular
courses.

Genre-based tasks
This section discusses three categories of tasks in genre-based ESP courses:
rhetorical consciousness-raising, production, and process.
 Genre-based teaching materials 131

Rhetorical consciousness-raising
Rhetorical consciousness-raising tasks are perhaps the hallmark of ESP
genre-based teaching. As their name suggests, they are designed to heighten
students’ awareness of genre features and of how they function in their
contexts (Hyland, 2006, 2016b; Paltridge, 2001; Swales, 2011/1981, 1990).
The rationale behind these tasks is that the more conscious a person is of
how a genre works, the better prepared s/he is to participate in it, as a
speaker, listener, writer, or reader.
This idea, as Hyland (2007) points out, also parallels a belief in noticing in
ESP’s ‘sister’ field of second language acquisition: that in order for learners to
acquire a new feature of a second language (e.g., a grammatical construction, a
phoneme, a pragmatic usage pattern), they must first notice the feature in the
language input around them (Bergsleithner, Frota, & Yoshioka, 2013; Schmidt,
1990, 1993). Applying this notion to classroom materials, second language
teachers have used grammatical consciousness-raising activities to draw lear-
ners’ attention to target language syntactic forms and meanings (Ellis, 2002;
Rutherford & Sharwood Smith, 1988). Such tasks reflect a cognitive approach
to learning and teaching, which emphasizes students as “thinking beings”
who notice features in the linguistic data around them and “apply their mental
powers in order to distil a workable generative rule from the mass of
data presented” (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987, p. 43). As such, grammatical
consciousness-raising tasks are often inductive in nature; that is, they present
students with examples (e.g., a list of sentences in present perfect) and ask them
to notice general patterns in how the grammatical form(s) is/are used.
Similarly, rhetorical consciousness-raising tasks promote active, inductive
thinking by asking students to do their own analyses of genre moves, lex-
icogrammar, purposes, and/or contexts, in order to notice, and therefore
learn, how the genre works, including how its features vary across situations
(Hyland, 2006; Paltridge, 2001; Swales, 2011/1981, 1990). Essentially, then,
rhetorical consciousness-raising activities put students in the role of a genre
analyst, doing the kinds of investigations that you did in Chapters 2–4.
With their attention to noticing, these tasks address students’ learning
needs, and align well with either narrow-angle genre acquisition or wide-angle
genre awareness goals. They are also compatible with any of the course
designs discussed in Chapter 5, as they lead students to analyze genres relevant
to particular class themes, projects, or outside sites. In the following section, I
offer several examples of rhetorical consciousness-raising tasks that can be
adapted for various spoken and written texts and classroom contexts.

Same topic, different genres

For a basic level of genre-consciousness, one must recognize that different
genres exist. To cultivate this fundamental awareness, students can be asked
132 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

to contrast how two texts of different genres present the same subject
matter. In my undergraduate writing course on romantic love, for example,
I present students with two writings by anthropologist and love researcher
Helen Fisher, and together we identify genre-influenced differences between
her two texts. Both texts, excerpts of which are shown below, are on an
experiment that Fisher and her colleagues conducted on brain activity of
people in love.

Text 1

“Have you just fallen madly in love?” We used this line again when we
placed a new advertisement on the psychology bulletin board on the
SUNY Stony Brook campus. But this time we called for men and
women who were willing to recline in a long, dark, cramped, noisy
machine while we scanned their brains. Once again, we sought only
those who had fallen crazily in love within the last few weeks or
months, people whose romantic feelings were fresh, vivid, uncontrollable,
and passionate.
(Fisher, 2004, p. 61)

Text 2

Briefly, 10 women and seven men were recruited by word of mouth with
flyers seeking individuals who were currently in love. The age range was
18–26 years (M=20.6; median=21), and the reported duration of ‘being
in love’ was 1–17 months (M=7.4; median=7). Each participant was
orally interviewed in a semistructured format to establish the duration,
intensity, and range of his or her feelings of romantic love.
(Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2005, p. 59)

As you can see, and as my students also notice, Fisher’s two texts have quite
different ways of describing the same experiment. In Text 1, Fisher uses
conversational, engaging language to relay how she and colleagues recruited
people who were “crazily in love” and “willing to recline” in their “noisy
machine”; while Fisher, Aron, and Brown’s Text 2 is much more formal and
detached, curtly reporting on the numbers and ages of the participants and
using academic-style nominalizations like “duration” and “intensity” to
describe participants’ romantic feelings. Notice also that while the active
voice in Text 1 (e.g., “we placed a new advertisement …”) reminds us of the
researchers’ own human presence, Text 2’s passive voice (e.g., “Each parti-
cipant was orally interviewed …”) emphasizes the experimental processes
and occludes the experimenters. In class, we discuss how these textual dif-
ferences are shaped by Fisher’s source genres and contexts: Text 1 is from
one of Fisher’s popular-audience books, and thus its language is meant to
 Genre-based teaching materials 133

entertain—not just to inform—its non-specialist readership. The second

text, on the other hand, from Fisher, Aron, and Brown’s article in the
Journal of Comparative Neurology, follows formal RA conventions
expected by its scholarly audience. The takeaway for students from this
comparison is that different genres exist and, equally importantly, that
people use them to tell the same ‘story’ in different ways, highlighting,
embellishing, or hiding particular details depending on their particular purposes
and contexts.
This task can also be used to compare spoken genres. As a follow-up
activity, for example, my class watches videos of Fisher describing her
research in a TED Talk and on a day-time talk show, as seen at the fol-
lowing links, respectively: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYfoGTIG7pY and
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUTdLJxDr-E.
Here again we see that different genres and situations shape Fisher’s dis-
course and persona, even in such details as her lecture-style delivery, black
turtleneck, and eyeglasses in the TED Talk and conversational manner and
softer appearance on the talk show.

Text reassembly
Rhetorical consciousness-raising tasks can also get students to think about
genre moves. A particularly effective and fun moves-noticing activity is text
reassembly. Here students put back in order the pieces of a ‘jumbled’ text,
which requires them to observe what each piece of the text is doing (i.e., its
move(s)), and the piece’s appropriate place in the text organization (Swales,
2011/1981; see also Paltridge, 2001). In Task 6.1 you get to try this type of
activity as you reconstruct the pieces of a book review, a frequent critique-
type genre assigned in university courses (Nesi & Gardner, 2012; Swales &
Feak, 2012).

Task 6.1 Reassembling moves in a book review

The following text pieces were excerpted from a book review written by law
student, Rebecca Curtiss, for an Immigration Law course at City University of
New York (CUNY). Each segment is labeled with a letter for ease of reference
during class discussion, although the letters do not give any clues about the
correct order of the pieces. Read through these segments, and with one or two
classmates do the following:

1 Reassemble the segments in what you think was their original order rela-
tive to each other.
2 Label the move(s) in each segment; in doing so, remember that a move
describes the segment’s function in the text (see Chapter 2).
134 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

3 Discuss with your classmates the moves you identified and why you think
your proposed sequencing works well for this book review.
4 Explain whether you think such a text reassembly task and a follow-up class
discussion would be effective for teaching students about genre moves. For
example, to what extent would this activity engage students intellectually
and emotionally? How might you adapt such a task for an ESP course and
genre you are interested in teaching?

A couple of notes about this activity: The task is more fun if you cut the text into
pieces, put these in an envelope, and give each small group an envelope. Then, after
each group has collaboratively reassembled the pieces, they write up their order of
the piece letters on the board. The original text may need to be shortened in order
to make the task manageable for an in-class activity. For example, I omitted por-
tions of Curtiss’ book review, although the segments shown below still give a sense
of key moves in her text.

F Dow chooses to use story as the primary device to guide the reader through
dense immigration laws and history. Detainees and detention center workers
and wardens provide personal accounts of their experiences with the immi-
gration detention system. Dow supplements the stories with historical, legal
and cultural background. The combination of first person histories and
background context provides the reader with a clear connection between
immigration policy and its practical effects.

C The very first line of Dow’s prologue is “She can tell it better than I can.”
This quote was taken from a conference Dow attended where an immigrant
woman told her story of immigration detention. The use of the first person
voice to narrate the detention experience is powerful. First, this technique
humanizes a system dedicated to dehumanizing those confined within it.
Second, the stories are captivating and moving. Third, stories of detained
people allow the person a moment of empowerment in an otherwise
disempowering environment.

R The 2004 publication, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons by

Mark Dow, is an exposé of the modern immigration detention system pre-
and post-September 11. In this book, Dow exposes the horrific conditions
experienced by immigration detainees in detention centers scattered around
the country as if an archipelago that is essentially hidden in plain sight.

A The legal reader can use and adopt the story telling technique in litigation as
well as legislative reform. In collecting narratives, the practitioner can look to
Dow’s journalistic technique and sources. He is tenacious in his collection of
stories from different individuals involved with the immigration system and
researching immigration policy. His endnotes and bibliography provide a
wealth of source information to supplement any litigation or policy
campaign.
 Genre-based teaching materials 135

E American Gulag is an extremely valuable work for the legal audience not
only for its substance but also for the technique and style of the book. The
stories are revelatory and provide much needed information about the secre-
tive system of immigration detention. Dow’s journalistic style and technique
also offers insights to the legal advocate on how to investigate and present a
compelling and complete narrative.

P The vast majority of detainee stories were from men … The index lists
“women detainees” and contains references to abuse of women, menstrua-
tion, miscarriage, shackling while giving birth, rape and sexual abuse. All of
these topics are mentioned in the book but given surprisingly little attention.
The stories of women in the larger culture are so often ignored. Unfortu-
nately, Dow continues that familiar practice. In order to truly address the
conditions of all detainees in the immigration system he needs to give ade-
quate voice to detained women.

Z Dow initiates his examination of the immigration system by discussing 9/

11 and the immigration policy and practice that directly [followed] from
the 9/11 attacks precisely because most people will consider current
immigration practice from the post 9/11 perspective. From there he takes
the reader to Miami where he claims the contemporary era of immigration
detention begins with Cubans and Haitians in the 1980s. Dow then moves
into a multi-chapter discussion of immigration detainees housed in
criminal facilities, the effect of corporate run criminal facilities and the
1996 laws.
Source: Excerpted segments from a book review written by Rebecca Curtiss for an Immigration
Law class. Curtiss’ entire review can be found on the following page of the CUNY School of Law
Legal Writing Center website: www.law.cuny.edu/legal-writing/forum/book-reviews.html.

Examining move variation

In a reassembly task like the one above, student discoveries may naturally
lead to a list of moves for the genre at hand, such as, based on Curtiss’ text,
book review moves like: introduction of the book, content summary, posi-
tive evaluation, negative evaluation, description of the book’s readership,
and concluding evaluation. Such lists are helpful for introducing students to
some of a genre’s possible parts. It is also important, however, for students
to recognize that not all instances of a genre have the same moves or express
them in the same way. ‘Within-genre’ comparisons are thus helpful for
building awareness of this variation. In an EAP course with students from
different disciplines, Swales (1990) suggests assigning students to collect
samples of the same genre across their fields, to collaborate with classmates
(in related and distant disciplines) in identifying similarities and differences
across their texts, and to present their findings in a class plenary session. As
Swales suggests, such comparison activities are also a way to deal with the
“managerial problem” of teaching a heterogeneous class (1990, p. 216, italics
original).
136 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

It may be interesting as well for students to examine genre move variation

within the same field, noticing the freedom genres allow for individual
speakers and writers, as illustrated in the following task.

Task 6.2 Comparing texts of the same genre

The short excerpts below show how Rebecca Curtiss and Bronyn Heubach,
two law students at the City University of New York (CUNY), express negative
evaluation moves in their book reviews written for an Immigration Law course.
Although the two students are evaluating different books, they both offer some
degree of criticism of their respective books—but in different ways. Read these
excerpts and answer the following questions.

Excerpt from Rebecca Curtiss’ review:

The vast majority of detainee stories were from men … The index lists
“women detainees” and contains references to abuse of women, men-
struation, miscarriage, shackling while giving birth, rape and sexual abuse.
All of these topics are mentioned in the book but given surprisingly little
attention. The stories of women in the larger culture are so often ignored.
Unfortunately, Dow continues that familiar practice. In order to truly
address the conditions of all detainees in the immigration system he needs
to give adequate voice to detained women.

Excerpt from Bronyn Heubach’s review:

[W]hile I agree with the author, the strength of his arguments is less than I
would have hoped for. For instance, the entire book rests on the premise
that we are actually living in an age of global apartheid. While I am a pro-
gressive thinker this is the first time I have encountered the idea of global
apartheid, so it is even more doubtful the average reader will have
encountered this idea, either.
(Curtiss’ and Heubach’s reviews can be found in their entirety
on the CUNY School of Law Legal Writing Center Website:
www.law.cuny.edu/legal-writing/forum/book-reviews.html)

1 How do Curtiss and Heubach differ in their ways of expressing negative

evaluation of their focal book?
2 Which of these students’ styles could you see yourself using if you were
writing a book review? Why?

A task like this showing differences within the same move (negative eva-
luation), within the same genre (book review), and within the same context
 Genre-based teaching materials 137

(an Immigration Law course) compellingly illustrates for students that

within genre move boundaries, students still have ‘space’ to express their
unique voices and styles.

Noticing lexicogrammatical features

In addition to global move structure, consciousness-raising activities may
attend to word- and sentence-level linguistic features of genres. The next
activity, for example, asks students to notice evaluative words in book
reviews. Such language indeed provides a great ‘in’ for discussing relationships
between a genre’s lexicogrammar and context, given that, as Thompson and
Hunston (2000) point out, “[e]very act of evaluation expresses a communal
value-system” (p. 6). Hyland (2004a), in fact, has identified values-shaped
evaluative vocabulary in published book reviews across disciplines, finding,
for instance, that while reviewers from marketing and applied linguistics
frequently use the words significant and insightful to express appreciation
for a book, engineering reviewers are particularly drawn to comprehensive
and practical to convey their praise (p. 51).
In the activity below, students observe positive evaluative words and
phrases in the two law students’ book reviews and hypothesize the connec-
tions between these words and their disciplinary context. A teacher could
pre-identify Curtiss’ and Heubach’s evaluative sentences and put them on a
handout for students to analyze, or, for a more challenging option, ask stu-
dents to find the evaluative expressions themselves within Curtiss’ and
Heubach’s whole reviews. To illustrate the handout version of the task, I
have listed below several sentences from Curtiss’ and Heubach’s reviews.
Students must find, circle, and label the part of speech of the evaluative
vocabulary in these sentences. Try doing this yourself.

American Gulag effectively exposes and explains how this occurs.

The stories are captivating and moving.
Nevins’ research is thorough and comprehensive, as evidenced by the
broad range of resources he draws from.
Nevins convincingly shows that no other answer to the question of
who bears responsibility for immigrant deaths at the border quite
resolves the entire issue.

The positive words and phrases that students notice are then listed in
a chart on the board. In the partially completed chart shown below
(based on more sentences than the four above), the words are categorized
by their parts of speech to show the range of word types that express
evaluation. In parentheses the evaluative word’s neighboring word(s) are
included; these are sometimes evaluative themselves, intensifying the
reviewers’ praise.
138 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs

a wealth (of source (effectively) substantive effectively
information) exposes (lessons) (explains)
(valuable) provides (very practical (lessons) effectively (uses)
contribution valuable valuable convincingly
information) (information) (shows)
(effectively) comprehensive
demonstrates (framework)
captivating
(stories)
moving (stories)
tenacious (in his
collection)
thorough (in his
research)
persuasive
(elements)

Viewing this chart, the class discusses patterns in the writers’ word choices
and what they suggest about the values of law as a discipline. For example,
expressions such as convincingly shows, effectively exposes, and moving and
captivating indicate that persuasion, not unexpectedly, is central to the field of
law. As well, phrases like wealth of source information and thorough and
comprehensive (research) point to the field’s emphasis on building an argument.
Of course, one cannot draw definitive conclusions about a genre or a dis-
cipline from just two texts in a single university course. Nevertheless, through
analyzing even a small number of texts, students may begin to develop a genre
awareness habit of mind, whereby they attend to textual features and potential
connections of these features to their cultural contexts.
When lexicogrammatical analysis tasks involve a larger number of texts,
corpus tools (see Chapter 3) are useful for generating samples of features
and sentence-contexts where the features occur. In her ESP course for Italian
undergraduates, Gavioli (2005) drew on such tools to develop consciousness-
raising activities for word and sentence patterns in English-medium business
genres. For example, in a task around bid—a word that had puzzled
Gavioli’s students when reading and listening to business news—the class
examined a software-generated concordance of 249 bid occurrences in
English-language news articles. In viewing the modifiers to the left of bid,
students noticed that the word often occurred in the phrase a takeover bid,
such as in the concordance lines below:

 keen to mount a takeover bid but would encounter fierce …

 signed to ward off a takeover bid. If Pearl decided to …
 said AMP’s takeover bid ‘is unacceptable and …
(From Gavioli, 2005, p.161)
 Genre-based teaching materials 139

To explore the usage of bid in this phrase, students examined the ‘exten-
ded contexts’ (i.e., the surrounding sentences) of the 20 occurrences of a
takeover bid in the corpus, a few excerpts of which are shown below. See if
you can notice patterns in these contexts of a takeover bid:

followed by a spate of bid rumours, the most sensational of which was

that Adia, the big Swiss-based recruitment consultant, was about to
launch a takeover bid.
GEC, Ferranti’s main British rival in radar, is also keen to mount a
takeover bid but would encounter fierce Ministry of Defence opposition
on the grounds that it would damage competition …
Mr. Louis-Dreyfus will have to work hard to recover the company’s
standing. He may also have to fight off a takeover bid.
(Excerpted from Gavioli, 2005, pp. 95–96)

From their analysis of these corpus examples, Gavioli’s students (and maybe
you too) observed that bid, and in particular a takeover bid, in business dis-
course is often used for transactions involving big companies, forthcoming pos-
sibilities rather than done-deals, and conflict. The corpus tools greatly enhanced
the possibilities for such consciousness-raising around this phrase, giving stu-
dents rapid access to multiple samples of it in a genre of interest to them.

Exploring genre contexts

Tasks can also be designed to raise students’ consciousness of genre contexts.
As suggested by Chapter 4, such context exploration is important for under-
standing the rationale for a genre’s textual features, as well as processes for
comprehending or composing in the genre and the genre’s impact on its parti-
cipants. In her own undergraduate EAP courses, Johns (1997) heightens the
context-consciousness of first-year students in part by having them talk with
professors about their disciplinary research practices. Working with more
established scholar-students, Curry and Lillis (2010) have developed context-
focused tasks for international academics seeking to present or publish their
research in English-medium conferences or journals. Their materials in parti-
cular focus on “the social practices of professional text production” (p. 325),
one of which is professional networking, which they find contributes greatly to
international scholars’ success navigating academic genres. To introduce inter-
national researchers to networking’s importance, Curry and Lillis present them
with real cases of scholars whose “text histories” (p. 328) involve significant
collaboration with others. The following is an excerpt from their case example
of ‘Istvan’, a psychology professor at a central European university:

Istvan’s prolific publishing record in his L1 and English (some 25 books

and 15 book chapters and articles in his L1, plus some 15 articles and
140 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

book chapters in English) has enabled him to establish two laboratories …

Istvan’s chief and longest-lasting research network began in 1997, when
two U.S. researchers read an article on cognition Istvan had published and
invited him to visit them. Istvan has since co-authored seven articles with
them, working by e-mail and occasional visits …

This description is followed by a concrete illustration of how Istvan colla-

borated with his student and U.S. colleagues to revise a previously rejected
article manuscript:

Istvan secured funding for TU [his student] to reconduct the experi-

ments … Then Istvan drew on TU’s new findings to craft a quite dif-
ferent version of the article. He sent this draft to WK [his colleague] in
the United States, who suggested detailed word- and sentence-level
changes and pointed to confusing areas such as explanations of the
research methodology. Istvan submitted the next revision to a new
English-medium international journal, which accepted the article pending
specified changes.

Later in Curry and Lillis’ activity, the international scholars reflect upon
what can be learned from Istvan’s networking practices, through questions
such as:

What different roles do these members of [Istvan’s] networks have?

What do they contribute in terms of methodology, data collection and
analysis, writing, reviewing drafts, making revisions to text?
Are you involved in research networks that extend beyond your local
context? If so, how? If not, do you know of any international networks
that you might want to join?
What do you (or could you) offer to and receive from others in the
network, particularly in relation to writing an academic journal article?
(Excerpts above are from Curry and Lillis, 2010, pp. 333–335)

Like other consciousness-raising tasks, Curry and Lillis’ activities are meant
to demystify genres that are important to students. What makes their activ-
ities unique in the heavily text-analytic world of ESP is their focus on con-
textual factors that make production in genres possible (see Paltridge (2017)
for further suggestions on classroom applications for exploring genre and
context).

Consciousness-raising for genre critique

For ESP courses with a critical pedagogy orientation (see Chapter 5),
activities can also lead students to notice what actions or power
 Genre-based teaching materials 141

relationships a genre makes possible (or not), and which users they advan-
tage or disadvantage. In their undergraduate writing textbook, Devitt, Reiff,
and Bawarshi (2004) offer a set of critical consciousness-raising questions, a
few of which are shown below, that engage students in these kinds of
observations:

 Whose needs are most served by the genre? Whose needs are least
served?
 Does the genre enable its users to represent themselves fully?
 Does the genre effectively accomplish what its users intend it to do?
 Does the genre limit the way in which its users can do their work?
(From Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004, p. 161)

Reflected in these questions is the recognition that genres can effect both
benefit and harm in the world, sometimes simultaneously. With such
awareness, students might also analyze how to make particular genres more
ethical in their capabilities. In one illustration of this possibility, Devitt,
Reiff, and Bawarshi (2004) describe an assignment in which two of their
undergraduates examined a U.S. school genre known as an individual
education plan (IEP). Required by law for learning-disabled students, IEPs
describe annual learning goals based on a beginning-of-the-year meeting
with teachers, principals, specialists, and parents. What the two under-
graduates observed is that these plans do not include any input from the
learning-disabled students themselves, “who have the most to gain or lose”
from their IEP (p. 180). To integrate these students’ participation in their
learning plans, the undergraduates proposed changing this genre to include
an additional form, one which would have a friendly appearance and be
entitled “This Year I Would Like To,” with “space for the learning-disabled
student to list five personal goals” (p. 180).
Critique activities can also evaluate positive aspects of genres for
individuals and communities, as seen in Auerbach and Wallerstein’s
(2004) Problem-posing at Work: English for Action, a critical pedagogy
English language textbook for immigrant workers. Along with readings
and discussions on various workplace issues, the authors include genres
that can empower disempowered workers. One such spoken genre
is refusal of unsafe work, illustrated in the following exercise, where
students must notice the moves that an employee, Manny, uses to perform
this genre.

Read the following dialogue: Find the place where Manny 1) reports the
problem, 2) makes a suggestion, 3) offers to do another job, and 4)
refuses to work.
Remember that you can only refuse if death or serious injury might
result and if the other conditions for refusing apply.
142 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Manny: I don’t think we should work on the scaffolding.

Foreman: What’s the problem?
Manny: The rope is loose and it’s not safe.
Foreman: There’s plenty of support. Don’t worry.
Manny: Could you get someone to fix it before we go up?
Foreman: We need to get the job done today. Just get to work.
Manny: Could we work on the ground floor instead?
Foreman: No, I told you we need to get this done.
Manny: I’m sorry, but I’m not going up there until it’s fixed. We could
get killed.
(From Auerbach & Wallerstein, 2004, p. 184,
slightly reformated).

To complement this moves analysis task, students could also explore contexts
when using this refusal genre actually kept immigrant workers from unsafe
work or helped them gain other rights. Auerbach and Wallerstein indeed offer
an encouraging example of two workers who, after refusing a treacherous job
assignment, were disciplined by their company but then subsequently won their
case with the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).
For a critical consciousness-raising activity that asks students to evaluate
a genre’s ethical potential on their own, you might assign something like the
following prompt, which I have synthesized from several tasks in Devitt,
Reiff, and Bawarshi (2004, pp. 161, 180).

Choose a genre that you are interested in evaluating. Analyze the effects—
positive and/or negative—that this genre has on its users by answering and
taking notes on the “Questions for Critiquing Genres” above, as they
apply to your chosen genre. Then explain either or both of the following:
1) how this genre should be changed to maximize the good it is able to do
for those it impacts; 2) how you could use this genre, in its current or
changed form, to make a positive difference in your own life or in the lives
of others.

Thus far, we have looked at several possible rhetorical consciousness-

raising tasks, including:

 comparing two genres for how they present the same subject matter
 reassembling genre moves
 identifying lexicogrammatical features, manually and through corpus tools
 noticing genre variation by comparing texts across fields or across
individual writers and speakers
 reflecting on case studies of genre contexts
 exploring the work that a genre does and to whose advantage or
disadvantage.
 Genre-based teaching materials 143

Other possible consciousness-raising tasks include the following (synthe-

sized from Hyland, 2006; Paltridge, 2001; Swales, 2011/1981):

 color-coding moves in texts

 coming up with labels for moves according to what they are doing in a
text
 surveying published advice about a genre feature and comparing this
advice to examples of the genre feature that students find
 examining similarities and differences between a genre in English and in
students’ home languages
 discussing how English-medium genre features relate to or conflict with
students’ sense of identity and culture
 and others! For examples of various rhetorical consciousness-raising
tasks, see also Swales and Feak’s (2012) book Academic Writing for
Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills.

You may now be interested in designing consciousness-raising activities of

your own. The next section offers you some guidance for how to do so.

How to create rhetorical ccnsciousness-raising tasks

Given that consciousness-raising activities are strongly based in the genre
analysis techniques you learned in Chapters 2–4, you already have a great
foundation for creating them. Below I suggest several general steps for
designing these activities.

1 Select a genre that is relevant to your students’ needs and to your course
design, including your course themes, projects, or target sites.
2 Decide on an aspect of this genre that you would like your students to
become more aware of, such as the genre’s moves, lexicogrammatical
features, purposes, or contexts. Although you may want the class to
focus on all of these aspects, start with one and then develop additional
activities later for the other aspects.
3 Do your own analysis of your selected aspect by collecting sample texts
that illustrate that aspect and applying the genre analysis skills you have
learned earlier in this book.
4 Now, for the activity itself, select one or two example texts, or
create one of your own, that will illustrate clearly for students the
specific textual or contextual features you would like them to notice
about the text(s). (See also the section later in this chapter, “Text
selection”)
5 Design a task for students to do with the selected text(s) that will lead
them to notice the focal feature(s). A few things to keep in mind as you
create the activity:
144 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

a Give students a specific focus in the task, such as identifying a

particular move (or a small number of moves) in a text; circling all
instances of a specific grammatical pattern, or discussing the power
relationship between two people using the genre. Having a narrow
focus will keep students on track, make the task more interesting,
and allow it to be accomplished within a reasonable time frame. A
broad directive like “Analyze this text” could be overwhelming (or
boring) to students and not achieve the desired consciousness about
a specific feature.
b Whenever possible, include a focus on both form and function of
the genre feature or its contexts, to give students a sense of how
formal features serve particular purposes for the people who use
the genre.
c Let students do the noticing. You may be tempted to explain to
students how the genre or context feature works. But your ‘lec-
tures’ are not likely to stick in students’ minds as effectively as will
students’ own discoveries during the task. As Tomlinson (2010)
points out, “If learners notice for themselves how a particular lan-
guage item or feature is used … they are more likely to develop
their language awareness … [and] are also more likely to achieve
readiness for acquisition” (p. 93).
d Encourage collaboration in the task so that students learn from
each other and have more fun along the way. In other words, the
“notice for themselves” that Tomlinson refers to can be done in
pairs or small groups, and then followed up with whole-class
discussion.
e Make the activity enjoyable. Students will be more motivated to
have their consciousness raised if they enjoy the process. So select
interesting texts to analyze; design the task so that there is more
than one possible answer to debate during the whole-class discus-
sion; make the task into a kind of puzzle, such as reconstructing the
original move order, guessing the gender of the text author, spec-
ulating on the meaning of a phrase and then checking it against the
corpus data, assigning students to research a genre feature for
homework and giving a prize for the most unusual example found;
and so on.

Text production activities

An important complement to rhetorical consciousness-raising is text pro-
duction. In their study of an engineering communications course, Artemeva
and Fox (2010) discovered that even if students were aware of a genre, they
were not able to perform it effectively without prior production experience.
Specifically, most students at the beginning of the communications course
 Genre-based teaching materials 145

could identify a technical report and its characteristic features; however,

only 11 percent of them could actually write such a report. In fact, when
asked to do so, many wrote secondary-school type essays with “descriptive
narratives containing emotional language and rhetorical questions” (p. 494).
Those few students who did produce a technical report had written one pre-
viously, leading Artemeva and Fox to conclude that “situated performance” in
a genre—and not just genre exposure or recognition—is “a primary vehicle for
genre acquisition” (p. 497). In her study of four multilingual graduate students,
Tardy (2009) similarly found that the students’ repeated practice composing
in their disciplinary genres was key to building their writing ability and
confidence.
With this importance of text production in mind, I offer below several
examples of production tasks. These activities vary in how ‘controlled’ they
are. The controlled practice tasks lead students to imitate specific genre
features and thus may be particularly suitable for newcomers to these features.
The scaffolded production and interpretive production activities, on the
other hand, require more independent decision-making, with the scaffolded
tasks providing students with guided preparation for those decisions and the
interpretive ones less so.

Controlled practice of a genre feature

Some production tasks tightly control student output, such as this activity from
Feak and Swales’ (2010) RA writing course for postdoctoral fellows in peri-
natology. Here the fellows practice using “pre-fronted prepositional phrases,”
which Feak and Swales observe are “usefully ‘snappy’” structures for describing
what data are omitted from a study, as in “Of the remaining 874 infants, 68
were excluded because of missing information on …” (p. 292). Try doing this
exercise (see below)—which Feak and Swales report was done aloud and “sui-
tably enjoyed” by the postdoctoral fellows (p. 292)—remembering to front the
prepositional phrase but retain the original sentence meaning.

Rephrase the following so that they conform to [the sentence pattern] above:
1 Michael Jordan is the most famous of all recent basketball players.
2 65 percent of those who failed to respond to treatment had some form
of diabetes.
3 Only two of the six variables investigated produced statistically sig-
nificant results.
4 1,509 women were excluded if there was missing information of leisure
activities out of a total sample of 48,145.
5 2% (N=36) of the total cohort were lost to follow-up (i.e., moved, delivered
elsewhere, records not found) and were excluded from the analysis.
(From Feak & Swales, 2010, p. 292)
146 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

In this controlled practice, students need only to transform the order of the
sentence parts, without composing any new content. Such a narrow focus on
form can be useful when trying out a genre feature for the first time. In sub-
sequent, less controlled activities like writing a research method section, students
could then try using this feature within their own sentences. Also worth noting is
the way the task’s five sentences are sequenced according to complexity. The first
one, about Michael Jordan, is short and ‘everyday’; the next two are longer and
more ‘research-y’; and the last two are longer still and, in fact, the only ones that
illustrate data-exclusion statements in method sections—the original point of
Feak and Swales’ lesson. This activity thus illustrates how even a controlled task
can start with something students can easily do and then gradually build up to
greater challenges.
Bosher (2010) offers another example of a controlled sentence-revision
activity, this time focused on the nursing genre of narrative notes. Used
within patients’ charts to record their physical conditions and symptoms,
these notes are interesting lexicogrammatically in their “telegraphic” lan-
guage (i.e., abbreviated sentence grammar) to express only essential
“thought units” (p. 357). In the task below, Bosher gives her multilingual
prenursing students practice with this feature by transforming complete-
sentence descriptions of patients into nursing note style. Try doing this
yourself—it is an interesting challenge!

For each of the situations below, write a narrative nursing note for the
patient’s medical record. Change the full sentences to thought units,
using telegraphic language. Refer to previous exercises for the specia-
lized terminology, concise wording, precise wording, and common
abbreviations that you need to complete this activity. The first one has
been done for you.
Example:
On January 6, 2005, at 9 a.m., Mr. A tells you that he took a long time
to void and that he had pain while voiding. He stated that he flushed
about half a cup of urine down the toilet.
Narrative nursing note:
1/6/2005 0900 States that he voided with difficulty. Approx 125 ml
amber urine discarded by self.

1 On January 7, 2005, at 3 p.m., Mrs. B said that she had a bad pain
just under her breastbone that went toward her left shoulder. The
pain lasted 10 minutes. During that time, she had trouble catching
her breath. She was sweating.
(From Bosher, 2010, pp. 365–366; four more items to
transform are also included in the exercise)
 Genre-based teaching materials 147

Like Feak and Swales’ prepositional fronting activity, Bosher’s task provides
students with the topical content, leaving them to alter only the sentence
structures. As you may have noticed, though, her task is less controlled than
prepositional fronting and thus more challenging. Although the directions
say students can refer to prior exercises on note phrasing, they must still
figure out their own way to boil down the description into note form.
Also, there are likely multiple acceptable note ‘answers’ to each item (as
opposed to the single-answer style of the prepositional fronting task),
illustrating the fact that even certain controlled practice tasks allow for
some originality.

Scaffolded text production

Some production activities are substantially less structured, requiring stu-
dents to generate much of the ideational content and language of their texts.
These ‘freer’ activities nevertheless can still offer students substantial direction
on how to use the target genre. Such guidance is sometimes described as
scaffolding, that is, support or assistance given to novices acquiring new
skills or knowledge. Feak, Reinhart, and Rohlck’s (2009) Academic Interac-
tions textbook illustrates well some possibilities for scaffolded production
tasks. In their chapter “Communicating by Email,” for example, students
are assigned to write three hypothetical apology email messages to pro-
fessors, but this task only occurs after the chapter has described typical
email message moves (e.g., greeting; the apology; a brief explanation or
excuse; your action plan) (p. 76); asked students to analyze five sample
email apologies for their effectiveness in achieving these moves; and
engaged them in controlled practice with be sorry constructions (e.g., I’m
sorry about/for/that). Given all of the preceding preparation, by the time
students encounter the following prompt, they have been substantially
scaffolded with strategies for producing various parts of the apology email
genre:

Compose three email messages, each of which includes an apology and

an explanation. You may choose from the situations given or choose
situations of your own. Be sure to include the subject heading and an
appropriate opening and closing […]

1 You missed a meeting with your advisor to go over courses for the
upcoming semester.
2 You couldn’t finish the assigned paper in time to turn it in on the
due date.
3 You are always late to English class because the class you have
before it is quite far away from campus.
(From Feak, Reinhart, & Rohlck, 2009, p. 82)
148 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Interpretive text production

In other tasks, students must work more independently, interpreting (and
sometimes researching) what genre moves and linguistic elements are fitting
for the context at hand and then using these in their own texts. I offer here
two examples of such interpretive production tasks, both of which require
students to assess a new context and determine how to express themselves
within the genre and situation.
The first example involves a university French course designed around a
simulated site, a fictitious Paris apartment building for which the students
take on the identities of the building’s residents (Dupuy, 2006; Michelson
& Dupuy, 2014). Within these identities, students engage in a range of
genres, including answering-machine messages, conversational interactions
with fellow residents, advertisements, invitations, postcards, and Facebook
profiles and posts. For the Facebook texts, students must interpret their
characters’ personas and select linguistic forms that capture what their
characters would say and how they would say it, given their characters’
ages, professions, personalities, and so on. One student, Trevor, in the
voice of ‘Pascal LeBlanc’—“an 81 year-old retired philosophy professor”
(p. 35)—posted in French the following Facebook comment about the job
interview performances of two of the other characters (Jean Paul LeClerc
and Thierry Pinot).

Apparement Jean Paul LeClerc a fait une bonne impression avec la

représentante de Disney—il savait tout de l’organisation en Europe et
aux États-Unis. Thierry Pinot, en revanche, n’a pas réussi dans son
entretien.
(Apparently Jean-Paul Le Clerc made a great impression on the
representative from Disney—he knew everything about the organization
in Europe and in the U.S. Thierry Pinot, on the other hand, was not
successful in his interview.)
(From Michelson & Dupuy, 2014, p. 35)

Michelson and Dupuy note that, in the post above, Trevor used the
formal academic French expression en revanche for ‘on the other hand’,
which “indexes his character’s age and profession” better than would a
similar expression like par contre (p. 35). Trevor, they said, also later com-
mented that he was conscious of the fact that formal speech would be one of
the markers of his character’s identity.
Bosher’s (2010) university prenursing course also engages students in
interpretive production, this time in the spoken genre of workplace con-
frontations between nurses and their patients or hospital personnel. In one
confrontation exercise, the students role-play the nurse and are reminded to
follow an ‘assertiveness’ move structure known by the acronym DESC or
 Genre-based teaching materials 149

DISC, which signifies “Describe the situation; Express your feelings or

Indicate the problem the behavior is causing; Specify the change you want;
and Consequences: identify the results that will occur” (Bosher, 2010, p. 358,
drawing on Davis, 2006). Beyond these general guidelines, students are on
their own to interpret what is called for in challenging situations like the
following (and to come up with an appropriate response). Think about what
you would say as the nurse in this situation (with only the DESC structure
to guide you) and why you would produce the utterances that you did.

You are a nurse providing care for a patient who states that he does not
understand you because of your accent. He also states that he has never
had to work with a foreign nurse before. He wants another nurse. It is
your responsibility to interview the patient to find out how he is feeling
and determine how much pain he is experiencing. The patient is reco-
vering from an appendectomy, but there seem to be complications. You
need to interview the patient right away and get the information to the
doctor. How do you respond to the patient’s concerns about working
with you? How do you get the information you need?
(From Bosher, 2010, pp. 367–368)

Interpretive production activities like these may be most effectively intro-

duced after students have developed relevant genre knowledge and/or sub-
stantial linguistic proficiency to draw upon. In Michelson and Dupuy’s Paris
apartment simulation class, for example, the students were intermediate-
level (in a fourth-semester French course). And in a nursing English class
like Bosher’s, one imagines that students might first engage in controlled and
scaffolded tasks to equip them with linguistic and cultural strategies needed
to navigate the interpretive role plays.
I would also like to point out that all of the production tasks we have
discussed in this section—controlled, scaffolded, and interpretive—can be
integrated into the various course designs (genre-focused, theme-focused,
project-focused, and site-focused) described in Chapter 5. Moreover, these
production tasks serve, to different degrees, both genre-acquisition and
genre-awareness goals. Regarding this latter point, all three categories of
production activities can help students acquire facility in using specific
genres or genre features. The less controlled (i.e., scaffolded or interpretive)
tasks also build awareness of genre–context relationships by compelling
students to consider what genre elements they might employ (or not) in
particular situations.

Process activities
In addition to consciousness-raising and production experience, classroom
tasks can focus on processes for producing or ‘receiving’ texts in particular
150 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

genres. Below, I consider some examples of process activities around source-

based research writing and university lectures.

Revising a literature review

Whether as a stand-alone entity or a section within a scholarly paper, the
research genre known as a literature review is challenging to write in,
requiring synthesis of others’ research and strategic framing of this synth-
esis to serve one’s own purposes. Newcomers to this genre may thus
appreciate learning processes for how to write an effective literature
review. One such process is revision, and, in fact, a literature review may
require multiple revisions before it becomes effective. In the chapter
“Drafting, Redrafting, and Redrafting Again,” Feak and Swales (2009)
offer an engaging set of activities illustrating possibilities for revising a
literature review in response to expert feedback. Their students/readers are
presented with three drafts of a literature review, each written by a doc-
toral student, “Joyce,” who is studying dissertations in education. They
are to evaluate these drafts and to consider Joyce’s advisor’s suggestions
for revision. Below is an excerpt from Joyce’s first draft reflecting her
initial attempt at a literature review.

It seems that six pieces of research have examined the structure of PhD
theses or dissertations. Dong (1998) surveyed graduate students and
faculty in science and engineering departments at two universities in
the southeast of the United States, and found on average that 38 per-
cent of the students were using the article compilation or “anthology”
format. In another study, Stålhammer (1998) found that the compila-
tion format was common in the psychology department of a Swedish
University …
(From Feak & Swales, 2009, p. 64)

The advisor, say Feak and Swales, communicated to Joyce that her lit-
erature review was “flat and boring” (p. 65). In response, Joyce wrote a
second draft, a portion of which is shown below.

There is, in fact, a small, growing and fascinating collection of recent

studies that have examined the structure of the dissertation. Given their
limited number, their geographical distribution is amazingly wide.
There are two studies from the United States (Dong 1998; Swales 2004)
and single studies from Sweden (Stålhammer 1998), Hong Kong (Bunton
1998), the United Kingdom (Thompson 1999), and Australia (Paltridge
2002). We thus have a global snapshot of what has been going on in
recent years in terms of dissertation structure. Overall, the findings
indicate that the alternative anthology format is alive and well,
 Genre-based teaching materials 151

especially in science, technology, and engineering … Clearly, it is time

for the traditional PhD dissertation to be given a decent burial.
(From Feak & Swales, 2009, p. 66)

On this draft, the advisor made the following comments, among others:

 OK, Joyce, don’t you think this is a bit overly enthusiastic? Do you
really think the previous work is fascinating? And what’s this about a
global snapshot? Can you tone it down a bit?
 I don’t think it’s your place to decide whether the traditional disserta-
tion should be abandoned. I think you may be losing sight of your
purpose.
 You haven’t discussed any of the studies. You’ve grouped them together
according to country, but is that the most meaningful way to approach
these studies?
(From Feak & Swales, 2009, p. 66)

On the third draft, Joyce significantly reconfigured the organization and

tone of her literature review, illustrated in its opening sentences below.

The previous section has shown that there is growing debate about the
role and value of the doctoral dissertation as a “capstone” educational
achievement. This in turn has led to a growing acceptance of alter-
natives to the traditional expanded IMRD format for the dissertation by
many university authorities (such as Dissertation Handbook, University
of Michigan, p. 20). Perhaps because of these developments, a small, but
widely distributed, body of research has recently emerged that attempts to
investigate the actual structure of dissertations in a number of contexts.
According to these studies, the main departure from the “traditional”
structure would seem to be that of an “article compilation,” sometimes
known as an “anthology” type (such as Dong, 1998) …
(From Feak & Swales, 2009, p. 67)

Feak and Swales’ Joyce series demonstrates for novice researchers that
revision is key in literature review writing, often involving substantial
re-thinking and reframing in response to feedback, and not just surface edit-
ing. As well, their follow-up discussion questions (not shown above) on each
of Joyce’s drafts serve consciousness-raising purposes, leading students to
notice what textual features make each of her drafts effective or not.

Synthesizing sources for a literature-based report

Beyond recognizing that revision is an important process, students may also
need help with how to revise (and before that, how to plan and draft)
152 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

literature reviews and other texts. Advocating greater attention to such

processes in genre teaching, Dovey (2010) observes that students particularly
struggle in source-based writing with how to connect and integrate sources
effectively. Indeed, it took Joyce several tries before she grouped her sources
according to types of alternative dissertations the source authors examined.
To help her graduate EAP students synthesize their sources within the genre
of “literature-based reports”—texts that inform “non-technical readers”
about research on a topic (p. 58)—Dovey gives them several tasks to guide
them through steps in the synthesis process. In an early activity, students
construct a “tree diagram” for each of their sources that outlines, in pictor-
ial form, key ideas and sub-ideas discussed in the source (p. 55). Students
then map common ideas found across their sources onto a “concept matrix,”
(p. 56), an example of which is shown below for a student’s literature-based
report on “E-health” (Table 6.1). As you can see, creating this matrix would
compel students to identify which of their sources address the same topics
and sub-topics, thus helping them to organize their reports and integrate
relevant sources within particular topic sections of the reports. Also useful is
the fact that the matrix requires students to note the page numbers where
each source addresses certain topics, a process step that students will be
grateful they did when they begin to compose their reports.
Dovey points out that before she implemented these activities for her
students, “exposure to expert product [i.e., genre models] was not an ade-
quate means of facilitating writing from sources” (p. 58). Process tasks like
the tree diagram and concept matrix, however, she says “have resulted in an
improvement in the organisation, coherence and cohesion of the final docu-
ment” (p. 58).

Listening to a university lecture

In addition to aiding students with their text productions, process activities
can assist students in genre reception. Examples of such activities are
found in Salehzadeh’s (2006) Academic Listening Strategies textbook,
which aims to equip students with strategies for listening effectively to
university lectures, a genre that poses particular difficulties for non-native
English speaking students due to its “messy” spoken language features
(p. 34). To help students with the process of dealing with these features,
Salehzadeh asks them to listen to or read the transcript of an authentic
lecture and identify such elements as fillers (e.g., okay, all right, um, well,
uh), informal terms and slang, reductions (e.g., gonna), contractions (e.g.,
should’ve), and incomplete or ungrammatical phrases and sentences
(p. 29). In one activity, for instance, students observe examples of these
features in an authentic introductory biology lecture, a portion of which is
included in the transcript below. See if you can find some of the spoken
language elements listed above in this segment.
Table 6.1 Concept matrix in the process of writing a literature-based report
E-heath: an investigation of its implementation in developing countries
Author Introduction Benefits of E-health in Barriers to E-health in developing Potential solutions to barriers in
and year developing countries countries developing countries
of publica-
Back- Health For For For Finan- Techno- Law and Cultural To To tech- To law To cul-
tion
ground in devel- patients health public cial logical policy and financial nologi- and tural
on E- oping experts health- social barriers cal policy and
health coun- care and barriers barriers social
tries hospitals barriers
Anderson 481 481
2006
Buys- 7 7–8 8 21 18 19
schaert
2009
Chen & 219 219 219 219 220 220 220 220
Xia 2009
Gupta 8 8–9
2009
Hjelm 61 60 65
2005
Kaur & 24 27 27–8 28 30
Gupta
2006
Nykanen 284 286 286
2006
(Continued)
Table 6.1 (continued)
E-heath: an investigation of its implementation in developing countries
Author Introduction Benefits of E-health in Barriers to E-health in developing Potential solutions to barriers in
and year developing countries countries developing countries
of publica-
Back- Health For For For Finan- Techno- Law and Cultural To To tech- To law To cul-
tion
ground in devel- patients health public cial logical policy and financial nologi- and tural
on E- oping experts health- social barriers cal policy and
health coun- care and barriers barriers social
tries hospitals barriers
Oak 2007 22
Ouma & 561 561 564 563 564 563
Herselman
2008
PHRMA 2–3 3
2002
Srivastava 11 12 12 12 12
2007
Yellowlees 334
2005

Source: From Dovey, 2010, p. 56.

 Genre-based teaching materials 155

Professor: um, I’ll move on. All right? …um, biology, simple definition
here, is just the study of life. So, that, begs the question … what
is alive?… okay who’s gonna give me a definition of what’s
alive?
Student 1: things that, react and reproduce
Professor: react, and reproduce. Do you have a grandmother?
Student 1: Yeah
Professor: Is she reproducing?
Student 1: Not lately
Professor: Is she alive?
Student 1: Yeah
Professor: So your definition doesn’t work. So she’s dead she’s you you’re
happy to redefine her as dead?
Student 1: uh … maybe I should’ve said the possibility of reproducing
Professor: Capable of reproducing? At some point in her life cycle?
Student 1: Right
(From Salehzadeh, 2006, p. 29, slightly reformatted)

Through such tasks, students can become more comfortable with spoken
language features and learn not to let these distract them from important
lecture content during the process of listening.
Reception activities may as well help students with the process of paying
attention to particular information. Salehzadeh, for instance, assigns students
to listen in lectures for stressed words, which are “louder and longer and
spoken at a slightly higher pitch,” as these often covey the lecturer’s key
points (p. 42). Even without Salehzadeh’s audio samples, experiment with
how this would work: Practice reading aloud the biology lecture segment
above, imagining the voices and styles of the professor and the student, and
underline what words you stressed. What types of words are they? If students
went through this process of paying attention to these stressed words (and
filtering out the rest), would they be better able to understand important
points from this lecture excerpt?

Sequencing genre-based activities

As you develop tasks for your ESP course, you will need to consider how to
sequence them within a lesson or multi-lesson unit. Below I offer some
guidelines for doing so.

1 Consider what activities your students need now and later within your
overall course plan. In the French apartment-building simulation, for
example, because students initially had to decide the building location
and the identities of their characters, their first tasks included researching
Paris neighborhoods and Parisian lifestyles and reading such texts as
156 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

maps and surveys about the French work week (Dupuy, 2006). In your
course you can consider which genres and aspects of those genres and
their contexts students will need to understand first, and then later and
then later still, and order your activities accordingly.
2 Sequence activities so that they build upon one another. Related to the
‘as needed’ ordering principle in point 1 is what Dudley-Evans and St.
John (1998) call the “building block” criterion for sequencing (p. 163),
similar to ‘scaffolding’, discussed earlier. If you want to cover verb
tenses in conference abstract moves, for example, you can first include a
task on abstract moves, which will serve as a foundation for a sub-
sequent class discussion on tense shifts across these moves.
3 Address one element of a genre at a time (at least at first). Genres, as
you know by now, are multidimensional, characterized by organizational
and linguistic elements, actions they accomplish, communities and indi-
viduals that use them, and much internal variability. Your students,
however, do not need to apprehend all this at once. As Tardy (2009)
points out, a multidimensional understanding of genre is “built up gradu-
ally through time, experience, and practice,” and thus “[i]t may be some-
what overwhelming for novices … to dive head-on into an investigation
of generic complexity” (p. 285). In your activity sequence, therefore, it is
okay to begin with an exercise that deals with one genre dimension and
then gradually include other tasks that address additional dimensions.
4 Vary the task types in your activity sequence. Given that different
activities build different types of genre knowledge and skills, it is useful
to include a range of tasks in each of your course units. Variety also
helps prevent boredom, as one type of activity (e.g., moves analysis), no
matter how engaging at first, could become tedious.
5 Include an interesting “hook” activity at the beginning of the sequence.
Try to begin each unit with an enjoyable task that captures student
interest. In my own lesson sequence on the book review genre, for
example, I start by showing the class two YouTube videos of The
Hustle dance (see Chapter 2) followed by discussion of the dancers’
moves and ways that dance genres are similar to written genres. This
activity energizes the students and gets them in a good mood for the
next activity on analyzing book review moves.

Text selection
Genre-based tasks are usually based around one or more texts. In rhetorical
consciousness-raising activities, for example, texts illustrate particular fea-
tures of a genre or its context; in production tasks, they serve as models to
follow or modify, or as content sources to incorporate; in process activities
they can be used in various phases of text construction or reception. Equally
important, a good text can add interest to a lesson. Below I discuss several
 Genre-based teaching materials 157

types of texts—authentic, teacher-created, and student-generated—that you

might select for your genre-based tasks and particular advantages of each
text type.

Authentic texts
The prevailing view in ESP regarding classroom materials is that texts
should be ‘authentic’, that is, taken from the real world rather than created
exclusively for teaching (Basturkmen, 2010). The argument for using
authentic texts is straightforward: To prepare students for the world outside
of our classrooms, we should expose them to realistic examples of genres
they will encounter ‘out there’. Johns (1997), for example, asserts that “[t]he
texts we choose should be full and unabridged, preserved just as they have
been written, with letterheads, headings, spacing, fonts, visual detail, errors,
and, if possible, even the quality and color of the paper” (p. 118). The same
can also be said of spoken genre exemplars—that is, that they should retain
all of their naturally occurring elements, including “ums” and “ahs,” errors
and repairs, and overlaps and interruptions across speakers.
An ESP materials designer can obtain authentic texts from existing corpora,
some of which are freely available (see Chapter 3). Both Salehzadeh (2006) and
Feak, Reinhart, and Rohlk (2009), for instance, have incorporated MICASE
texts into their EAP listening and speaking materials. And Angouri (2010)
drew on a collection of 21 audio-recorded business meetings to develop
materials on meeting turn-taking, which is often livelier and messier than
how it is represented in business English textbooks. You might also choose
to collect your own text samples for genres you are researching or teaching,
as Basturkmen (2010) did for police genres, Downey Bartlett (2005) for
coffee service encounters, and Feak and Swales (2010) for perinatology RAs.

Teacher-created texts
Although authentic texts are important for representing genres accurately,
so-called non-authentic materials, i.e., those created by teachers, curriculum
developers, or textbook authors, may still have benefits in a genre-based
course. For one, they can be composed with the language level and learning
needs of the students in mind, often making them more accessible than
authentic texts. In addition, teacher-created materials may at times be
superior for illustrating certain target genre features. This is especially true
when ESP practitioners are faced with what Swales (2009a) calls the “no
perfect text” problem (p. 6); that is, the impossibility of finding a suitable
genre exemplar despite long hours of “leafing through textbooks, manuals,
journal articles or websites” (p. 5). When faced with such a dilemma, Swales
has composed his own genre models. In fact, here’s a surprise for you: The
three “Joyce” literature review drafts discussed above were written by
158 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Swales himself(!), who also constructed the fictional Joyce character.

Reflecting on his reasons for doing so, Swales (2009a) notes that it would
have been nearly impossible to find real-world samples with the journalistic
style of Joyce’s second draft and the integrative synthesis of her third draft,
especially by one student. In cases like these, “when no amount of searching
or sleuthing” will produce the desired genre exemplars, Swales encourages
teachers to exercise their “textual creativity” (p. 12).

Student-generated texts
Students can also be a source of texts for your course. Johns (1999), for
example, asks her undergraduates to bring to class samples of genres from
their everyday lives, such as laundromat flyers or their favorite magazines,
and to analyze them for their purposes, visual designs, linguistic elements,
and their impact on communities. These ‘homely genres’ (Johns, 1997;
Miller, 1984) provide students with an accessible inroad to examining how
genres shape and are shaped by their social contexts, thus priming them “to
view academic discourses as socially constructed as well” (Johns, 1997,
p. 39). In other courses, students may be asked to collect multiple samples of
a particular genre for use during and after their ESP course. Both Charles
(2014) and Lee and Swales (2006), for example, have taught students to
build their own computerized corpora of RAs in their disciplines and to
analyze them using corpus software.
Having students collect their own texts has several benefits. The texts are
usually relevant to students’ personal, academic, or professional interests, so
students may be more motivated to study them. Student-collected texts are
also another source of authentic materials, and a whole class of student
sleuths can generate a larger and better pool of genre exemplars for class
discussion than the solo teacher searching for the elusive awesome text.

Task 6.3 Finding, creating, and asking for texts

1 Select one spoken or written genre. Pick a genre that you have not yet
chosen for other tasks in this book. Here are a few options to get you
going:
a a brief news summary on the radio
b a letter of complaint to an airline
c a job application letter
d another genre of your choice.
2 Do all of the following:
a Find an authentic (i.e., real world) text illustrating this genre
b Create your own text illustrating this genre.
 Genre-based teaching materials 159

c Ask your students (or if you are not presently teaching, a peer) to find
a text illustrating this genre.
3 Looking at your three or more texts generated in step 2, discuss which of
these texts would work well for developing activities around the genre, and
why? If more than one of these texts would be useful in their own ways,
explain that also.

Assessing the impact of course materials

After selecting your texts, designing accompanying tasks, and figuring out a
reasonable activity sequence, you may want to find out if your genre-based
materials actually work. Do your tasks, for example, help students to become
more skillful at using a particular genre, or to develop genre awareness, or to
become more confident speakers and writers? Are the materials interesting
and motivating to students? This final section turns to how you might address
such questions through various assessment measures, including portfolios,
text annotations, pre- and post-tests, and student interviews.

Portfolio assessment
One way of assessing the impact of your materials on student learning is
through portfolios. These are collections of texts that students compile to
represent their work and development throughout a course (Hyland, 2007,
2016b; Johns, 1997). Portfolios typically contain both primary texts—that is,
those that students have produced for class assignments—and one or more
reflective texts in which students comment on their primary texts and their
experiences creating them. The primary and reflective texts in tandem offer
teachers insight into students’ learning, as they demonstrate genre skills
students have acquired, their awareness of factors shaping their texts, and
their intellectual and rhetorical development over the trajectory of the
course. Although portfolios typically showcase students’ written work, they
may also include recordings of students’ spoken texts or multimodal texts
combining print, video, and audio media.
Portfolios can be used in various course designs. Johns (1997), for example,
has assigned portfolios in linked courses (see Chapter 5). In one of her EAP
courses linked to an undergraduate history class, students included within
their portfolios the following entries:

 a source-driven paper based on one of their history course assignments

 a reflection on their paper and what they learned from doing it
 a summary and critique of a spoken presentation they gave in the history
class
160 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

 a reflection on how this summary/critique was similar to or different

from other summaries they had written
 a first-person account of an event in which they were “an actor in history”
(p. 147)
 the first page of one of the readings required in the history class
 a reflection on why that reading was important, difficult, and/or interesting
to them; and what they had learned from it
 a timed essay they had written in the EAP class (based on prompts from
their history class), and reflection on how it was similar to or different
from other genres in their EAP and history class.

Varied entries like these offer teachers interesting data on what students
have learned through their courses.

Textual annotations
Another way to assess students’ genre learning is through textual annotations.
Here students make notes in the margins of a text (or orally aloud) to
articulate what they are noticing about the writer’s or speaker’s genre choices.
Cheng (2008) has used such annotations to evaluate his students’ developing
awareness of these choices within the RA genre. He has focused, for example,
on the annotations of an engineering doctoral student, Fengshen, whose
comments on part of an RA introduction are shown below; the article excerpt

Table 6.2 Graduate student’s annotation of an RA introduction

Excerpt from research article Fengshen’s annotation
introduction
This article describes a network This is the end of introduction in this
architecture and protocol that supports article. After giving the objective of this
both of these dimensions of service article, the author continues to evaluate
portability: device portability and the new method. He does not give a
location independence. These portable road map for the next part. The last
services bring with them many sentence is very interesting to me. The
challenges, but even more opportunities. author acknowledges that this new way
would bring many challenges but he is
very optimistic because he is confident
that the opportunities it brings us are
predominant. My guess is in the discus-
sion part, some of the challenges will be
brought up, so the author already paves
his way for it in the beginning of the
article. This tells us that echo in the
whole article and pave your way for
later parts are very helpful for your
readers to understand your paper.
(From Cheng, 2008, p. 61, reformatted)
 Genre-based teaching materials 161

is on the left and Fengshen’s annotation on the right. Cheng suggests that
annotations like this one reflect Fengshen’s “deepened understanding of how
writer, reader, and purpose interact in a piece of text” (p. 65).

Pre- and post-tests

To evaluate students’ acquisition of specific genre skills, teachers may also
compare students’ performances on production tests prior to and after the
genre-based instruction. Yasuda (2011) employed such pre- and post-tests to
ascertain if her EFL course activities on the email message genre improved her
Japanese undergraduates’ own writing of email messages. Below are the pre-
and post-prompts that Yasuda asked her students to respond to: Prompt 1 at
the beginning of the 15-week course and Prompt 2 at the end of the course. To
ensure that the data were comparable between these two time periods, the
prompts were similar, both requiring students to make requests of an
“improvement committee” in response to “perceived shortcomings in a
particular area” (p. 119).

Pre-test, Prompt 1: Welcome to ABC University …! You might want us

to improve several things about the school, for example, school facilities,
cafeteria, and bookstore, etc. Please write an email and tell us your
requests. You must make at least two requests.
Post-test, Prompt 2: Welcome to Atsugi City! You might want us
to improve several things about the city, for example, the city’s
environment, entertainment, and public transportation, etc. Please
write an email and tell us your requests. You must make at least two
requests.
(From Yasuda, 2011, p. 119)

In comparing students’ email responses to these prompts, Yasuda found

that after the instruction (i.e., on Prompt 2), students’ messages had
improved in organization, linguistic sophistication and appropriateness.

Interviewing students
It can also be illuminating to ask students directly how useful they found
the course materials. Yasuda (2011), for example, supplemented her
email-writing tests by interviewing students in part about “how successful
the genre-based writing class was in helping them develop their genre
awareness, language use, and writing ability” (p. 119). Similarly, in my
own study of a genre-based EAP reading course, students were inter-
viewed about whether their reading abilities or habits had changed or
not since the course began and about how useful they found the class
activities (Hyon, 2002).
162 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Combining measures
It is possible, and often very fruitful, to combine assessment measures in
order to achieve a multi-angle, triangulated perspective on your course
materials. Cheng, for instance, used both student interviews and annotations,
and, in our respective studies, Yasuda and I combined pre- and post-tests
with interviews and written surveys. Portfolios as well could have com-
plemented these other measures. Tardy (2009) also collected a variety of
data to evaluate four multilingual graduate students’ development of genre
knowledge. These included texts that the students produced for their EAP
writing course and their disciplinary courses; interviews with the students
and their writing course teacher, and observations of the writing class and
teacher–student conferences. Through these, Tardy was able to piece toge-
ther a rich picture of influences inside and outside of EAP writing course
materials that contributed to the students’ genre learning.
You may now have some ideas for developing and evaluating ESP genre-
based teaching materials of your own. The next chapter offers you further ideas
for doing so, as it explores future directions for genre research and teaching.
Chapter 7

Exploring future issues

Genre play, learning, and transfer

This final chapter looks to possibilities for future ESP genre work in two
emergent and interrelated areas: 1) genre play and 2) genre learning transfer.
Taking each of the two topics in turn, the chapter considers why they are
worth studying, current observations about each, and possibilities for future
research on them and their intersections. The chapter concludes by considering
how teaching that includes genre play may build students’ adaptability as genre
learners and users.

What is genre play and why study it?

Genre play as a phenomenon is most certainly not new, but ESP’s interest in
it has recently grown and promises to continue to do so for some time. As
conceived of in some current scholarship on the subject, genre play involves a
speaker’s or writer’s purposeful movement away from prototypical forms or
functions of the genre s/he is using. A person who intentionally writes an
RA without punctuation, or mentions their favorite ice cream on a mortgage
application, or designs a funeral announcement as a crossword puzzle is
engaging in genre play. These sorts of departures from genre norms have
been variously described as genre innovation (Tardy, 2016), creativity
(Bhatia, 2008, 2014), improvisation (Schryer, 2011), inventiveness (Hyon,
2008), resistance (Bawarshi, 2003), and play (Devitt, 2011; Tardy, 2016). In
this chapter I stay with the term play, as it captures key senses of the other
descriptors, including novelty, intentionality, and fun.
In her recent book Beyond Convention: Genre Innovation in Academic
Writing, Tardy (2016) presents a number of reasons for studying genre play,
or innovation, as she primarily calls it. I integrate several of her reasons here
along with a few additional thoughts.

1 Genre play extends our concept of what a genre is and does. Although
we may typically think of genres as fairly strict textual frames con-
straining how we speak and write, genre play reminds us of the creative
forms, functions, and messages that are possible within these frames.
164 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

2 Related to 1, studying genre play offers us insight into our own human
nature. For example, the existence of genre play in nearly all of life’s
domains, including serious, convention-dominant ones, suggests ways
that humans are drawn to pushing boundaries and transgressing norms.
3 Genre play seems to be increasingly prevalent in spoken and written
texts of various sorts and in various spheres. Tardy (2016) observes that
in the world of research writing, for example, “more attempts at and
opportunities for innovation within genres seem likely” given the great
“diversity” and “mobility” of scholars collaborating on and distributing
their work around the world (p. 18). Bhatia (2014) has similarly sug-
gested that genres now are more likely to be complex than “pure” given
the “the complex communicative realities of the present-day profes-
sional and academic world” (p. 92). One such reality is the advent of
various online and social media technologies that encourage the blend-
ing of and playing with modalities and genres, and that showcase (for a
wide audience) various cultural and individual approaches to doing so.
4 In such a genre-innovative world, it can be confusing for our students to
know when it is okay for them to play with genres. Therefore, as Tardy
(2015) emphasizes, investigating how genre play is received in different
situations is important for illuminating—for both us and our students—
when genre innovations are “allowable and rewarded” and, alternately,
“when adhering to convention is a wiser option than breaking from it”
(p. 360).
5 Finally, as will be discussed at the end of this chapter, research on genre
play can illuminate its usefulness in genre-based teaching, particularly as
a means for building students’ flexibility as genre participants in a
genre-innovative world (Hyon, 2015).

Forms of genre play

ESP scholars and others have explored several varieties of genre play,
including genre stretching, genre mixing, and genre parody. This next sec-
tion considers what can be observed about these different play types, or
strategies, and reasons why individuals may choose to engage in them.

Genre stretching
As its name implies, genre stretching involves departing from or pushing
against a genre’s conventions, but in a way that stops short of ‘breaking’ the
text’s genre. A company that writes a car maintenance manual with jokes,
for example, is genre stretching, as is also a professor who delivers a lecture
via song or a restaurant owner who includes scratch-and-sniff pictures in her
menu. In each of these cases, the ‘stretchers’ are creating unusual members
of their genres (manual, lecture, menu) but they would be genre members
 Exploring future issues 165

nonetheless, albeit playful ones. Some scholars have used the similar term
‘genre bending’ (e.g., Bhatia, 2014) to refer to genre norm-deviations,
although bending has sometimes entailed more radical genre transformation
than stretching.
In terms of why people stretch genres, as Bhatia (2014) points out, in
some instances it may be to fulfill their own “private intentions” (p. 99).
Dunn (2005), for example, has found that in Japanese wedding speeches,
speakers may defy genre norms to compensate personally for their lack of
ability to follow these norms in the usual way. Typically in this genre, says
Dunn, speech-givers share personal anecdotes about the bride and groom.
Certain guests, however, choose to speak at length about things seemingly
unrelated to either member of the wedding couple because they do not have
enough personal knowledge of the couple to offer in their speech. Dunn
observed that a groom’s colleague at an electronics company, for instance,
included in his speech “a detailed description of the production process for
color filters for liquid crystal television screens” (p. 224). Alternatively,
guests may use these departures to promote themselves or their company, as
did one guest who, “[a]pologizing for sounding ‘a bit like an advertisement,’”
continued on to mention that his company “would be featured in an
upcoming television news program” that he “invited everyone to watch”
(p. 224).
Self-promotion may, in fact, be a driving force behind much genre
stretching, as illustrated well in an innovative lease-renewal letter Tardy
received from her apartment building’s rental company (Tardy, 2016). The
letter, which began with a standard salutation and notification that Tardy’s
lease was expiring, included this humorous twist on the closing move:

We truly, truly, truly hope you decide to stay with us but we also
understand that residents eventually have to move. Should you decide
not to renew, we will be very sad and require extensive psychological
therapy, so please renew.
(Tardy, 2016, p. 13)

Tardy suggests that this instance of genre stretching helped to further the
company’s “playful, off-beat” brand identity—an image that the company
readily cultivated in other ways as well, such as giving tenants move-in gifts
and front-door doughnut deliveries (p. 42).
Also related to private intention, genre stretching can be a means for
speakers and writers to resist dominant discourses and assert alternative
individual or cultural identities and ideologies (Tardy, 2016). Canagarajah
(2006) has observed this phenomenon with Tamil scholars publishing in
international contexts, including one scholar, Sivatamby, who, when writing
an RA for an international English-medium journal, left out typical intro-
ductory moves such as literature review, creating a niche, and article preview,
166 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

omissions that are characteristic of some Tamil research publications. Cana-

garajah (2006) suggests that such opting out of certain genre norms is one way
that multilingual writers like Sivatamby locate “spaces within the dominant
conventions to insert [their] own voice and preferred conventions” (p. 600).
While genre stretching serves these individualized purposes for its users, it
can also (sometimes simultaneously) fulfill the conventional functions of the
genre. The lease letter Tardy received, for example, although idiosyncratic
in its promotion of the company’s fun image, did encourage her to renew
her lease—and its playful style achieved this in an effective, memorable way.
Ashmore’s innovative doctoral thesis (1985) and later book, The Reflexive
Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (1989) is another inter-
esting example of norm-stretching to achieve official genre purposes. His text—
which focuses on the topic of reflexivity in his discipline, the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK)—pushes the boundaries of all major parts of a
doctoral thesis. His opening abstract, for instance, ends abruptly in the middle
of a sentence about word length. The first chapter takes the form of a faux
university lecture in which a “Plump Bald-headed Old Geezer” in the back of
the room challenges the lecturer/author, who, disturbed, says to himself: ‘How
did he get in here? … I was supposed to be this week’s Expert, expected to
expound on an important and interesting topic for their edification and
instruction …” (Ashmore, 1989, p. 15). And there are many more inventive
elements throughout the book, including the final Notes section, which
addresses the reader in the following unusual ‘voice’:

Welcome to the Notes. I hope you will visit this section of the text
regularly. Quite a lot will be going on here and it would be a shame to
miss it all. But to get to the business of this particular note. May I ask
you by which route you have arrived at Chapter One, note 1?
(Ashmore, 1989, p. 227)

With all of these innovations, one might wonder whether Ashmore’s text is
a real thesis, or just a parody of one. But interestingly, these playful, parodic
features serve his thesis’ scholarly argument, which in this case is about
reflexivity in SSK, a discipline that studies the status of knowledge claims in
other fields but, as Ashmore highlights, is not always reflexive about its own
claims. Through playing with thesis conventions, Ashmore puts a con-
sciously reflexive spotlight on his thesis and, more broadly, on the need for
reflexivity in SSK.

Genre mixing
Another form of genre play is genre mixing, that is, the blending of features
from multiple genres within a single text (Bhatia, 2014). Examples of hybrid-
genre texts are indeed many and varied, from a marriage proposal on a
 Exploring future issues 167

fortune cookie strip to a graphic-novel cookbook (e.g., Capps, 2013). One

sphere where Bhatia (2014) has observed genre mixing to be common is
advertising, where marketers are “always on the lookout for novel strategies
to promote their products and services” (p. 154). In such texts as “adver-
torials” (p. 101, 154), for example, elements of the news editorial genre are
mixed into an advertisement to help persuade consumers to buy the product.
One thinks here of advertorials for medical treatments, where journalistic
formatting and language are meant to lend credibility to the advertiser’s
potentially questionable claims.
In academic settings, as well, students have been observed to playfully
mix genres for various purposes—some also self-promotional—even in
response to not intentionally playful assignments. Tardy (2016), for instance,
reports that in her first-year undergraduate writing course, an Argentinian
international student majoring in art, Juan Tauber, submitted a highly
innovative set of hybrid texts for the final portfolio project. For the portfolio’s
required reflective cover letter, Juan wrote something that read like “a pro-
logue to an art history book,” and—even more creatively—told in the voice
of a fictional art historian discovering Juan’s writing posthumously (Tardy,
2016, p. 157). The excerpts below give a sense of Juan’s mixed cover letter/
prologue.

Continuing my research on the life and work of the acclaimed under-

ground artist Juan Tauber (1978–2015) I recently discovered a series of
essays, presumably written by him in the winter of 2008, that provide solid
examples of the artist as a young person and his early ideas on art …
As the records show, Juan Tauber was born in 1978 in a small city
named Rio Cuarto in the province of Cordoba, Argentina … At the age
of 19, presumably fleeing from the law with a much older lover, he
moved to the capital of that country, Buenos Aires. There, Tauber
enrolled in the UBA (University of Buenos Aires) pursuing a degree in
textile design …
(From Tardy, 2016, p. 156, excerpted from her Figure 5.4)

Later in this text, Juan, still in the narrator’s voice, does indeed comment
on his writing in Tardy’s course, as was expected for the assignment. Also,
as required, he includes samples of his course writing within his portfolio.
Yet even here he mixes genres, “re-design[ing]” his writing samples to look
like “crumpled artifacts rather than freshly submitted student papers”
(Tardy, 2015, p. 340).
In terms of what possibly motivated Juan’s genre play, Tardy (2015) tells
us that throughout her course, Juan “was not one to write within the box”
and that he “took an unconventional approach” on all of the class assignments
(p. 340). Thus, his textual blends in the portfolio might be a way to express
his personality, voice, and identity (in the spirit of “private intentions”
168 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

(Bhatia, 2014)). Simultaneously, however, Juan might be genre mixing in

order to fulfill standard purposes of a first-year undergraduate writing port-
folio. Tardy, in fact, observes that Juan’s experimental prologue enhances
the reflectiveness desired for this project. Or, as she writes, “Taking an
outsider view to his own texts allows him a kind of critical distance that
actually results in a more persuasive reflection on his writing than is typically
found in this genre” (Tardy, 2016, p. 157).

Genre parody
Like genre stretching and mixing, parody is a kind of genre play with mul-
tiple potential motivations and effects. It is distinctive from these other genre
play forms, however, in that it hyper-imitates—rather than deviates from—
a genre’s features, and through this exaggerated mimicry, mocks the genre and
its purposes. In Bex’s (1996) words, parody “uses the conventions appropriate
to a particular genre to reveal and call into question the social functions
served by that genre” (p. 226). Thus, in many if not most instances, parody
actually creates a different genre with different purposes (i.e., critical exposé)
than the genre it is imitating; as Hyland (2004b) writes, it “impersonate[s]
the form of a genre while subverting its function” (p. 70).
Parodies have been performed of many genres—everything from news
broadcasts to funerals to documentaries (a.k.a. ‘mockumentaries’) and others.
Academic genres have also been parodied, including the ubiquitous RA. Bex
(1996) refers to one such parody RA (which you may appreciate as a language
teacher) entitled “The Use of Sensory Deprivation in Foreign Language
Teaching” published by Swan and Walter (1982) in the long-running and well-
regarded ELT Journal. At first skim, Swan and Walker’s text appears to be a
normal journal article, with the expected organizational moves. But a few
paragraphs in, the reader registers the ridiculousness of the content in these
moves, such as the following description of the experimental method in which
language students are “taken to their individual SD [sensory deprivation]
chambers … each containing a bath in which the water is kept at a constant
temperature of 37° C—blood heat” (p. 184). After 3–5 hours in their SD
chambers, the ‘article’ tells us, the students begin to hallucinate in the second
language (L2) input they heard in the half hour before entering the chamber.
They then are “dried off and dressed” and allowed to meet each other and
talk in the L2 (p. 184). However, they find it difficult to communicate because
“each subject has attached his own private hallucination-generated meanings
(‘H-meanings’) to the L2 elements that he has internalized” (p. 184).
This text caricatures the genre of the teaching methodology article, in
addition to critiquing, as Bex (1996) points out, “the dangerous faddishness”
that frequently invades English language teaching as a profession (p. 235),
where eccentric, trendy methods often come and go. Swan and Walter’s
critique, however, seems to be delivered with more collegial fun than bite.
 Exploring future issues 169

One imagines readers chuckling at the “worryingly high drop-out rate” of stu-
dents in these classes (p. 185); and fellow researchers who have coined their own
terms may laugh a bit at themselves when they read about the “H-meanings.” In
this way, Swan and Walter’s text and other parodies, despite their taunting
elements, can still entertain and build connection with their audiences.
Not all parodies, however, are delivered or received in a spirit of solidarity.
Another case of a fake RA, now known as the “Sokal hoax,” caused offense
and consternation among some of its readers (Secor & Walsh, 2004). Physicist
Alan Sokal submitted a manuscript, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which was accepted in
the journal Social Text (Sokal, 1996). Although Sokal’s manuscript was meant
as a critique of the journal’s cultural studies bent and of what Sokal perceived
as a general decline of academic rigor in the humanities, the journal editors
did not recognize the text as parody and published it as a real article (Secor &
Walsh, 2004; Tardy, 2016). Indeed, in their rhetorical analysis of this text,
Secor and Walsh observe that Sokal so skillfully imitated the syntax and
thematic focuses of Social Text articles that the editors missed his parodic
exaggerations, such as the 20 pages of endnotes and references. When Sokal
himself revealed, soon after publication, that his article was a fake, the reve-
lation not only embarrassed the journal but angered those who felt his
deception was harmful. Indeed, this type of genre play may be particularly
painful when it intentionally exposes people as not having recognized its
mockery. As Secor and Walsh point out, “[t]he Sokal hoax was all the more
stinging because it duped sophisticated academic professionals” (pp. 72–73).
In other ways, as well, parody may not always be perceived as such. Some
texts, for example, may both poke fun at a genre and fulfill some of its real
purposes, making it unclear whether they are parodic or true genre exemplars.
Instances of such ‘in-between’, semi-parodic texts are plentiful in comedic
news programs such as the The Daily Show. This program has news mockery
and humor as its core purposes, yet a number of viewers watch it as a main
news source (Feldman, 2007). It has also been found to include as much sub-
stantive news content as mainstream broadcast news programs (Fox, Koloen,
& Sahin, 2007) and has ‘acted’ like real news does, raising public awareness
of issues and even influencing U.S. government legislation (Carter & Stelter,
2010). Task 7.1 below gives you a chance to explore the elements that
contribute to both the parodic and real aspects of this show.

Task 7.1 Examining parody and reality in a comedic news show

1 Watch several episodes from The Daily Show www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-
show-with-trevor-noah on topics of interest to you.
2 Select one of these episodes for closer analysis.
3 What aspects of a real news show does this episode imitate?
170 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

4 How does this episode critique these aspects of real news or its subject
matter? For example, does it exaggerate them, caricature them in a parti-
cular way, and so on?
5 To what extent does the episode, even while making fun of the news, also
function as real news? How so?
6 What might be the potential usefulness of examining a comedic news show
in an ESP course?

What makes genre play work?

As the examples thus far have illustrated, speakers or writers engage in
genre play with potentially multiple effects—some that serve idiosyncratic
(often self-promotional) purposes of the individual ‘genre players’ and some
that fulfill status quo purposes of the genres they are playing with. Whether
individuals succeed in any of these purposes, however, depends not just on
their skill in genre stretching, mixing, or parodying, but also on how their
play is received by listeners and readers. Indeed, Tardy (2016) emphasizes
audience reception as crucial in determining whether genre departures count
as successful innovations or as deviant mishaps (p. 11). She and others have
identified several factors influencing the likelihood of audience receptivity to
genre play, including the flexibility of the genre, the authority of the genre
‘player’, and the perceived value of the play.

Flexibility of the genre

Speakers and writers are more likely to have their inventiveness accepted if
they are playing with genres whose conventions are frequently stretched.
These “baggy” (i.e., loose) genres, as Bawarshi (2003), after Medway
(1998), has referred to them, “provide more room for transgression than
others” (Bawarshi, p. 92). Of the genres discussed thus far in this chapter,
advertisements, comedic news shows, and multimedia texts would fall toward
the baggy end of the genre-flexibility continuum. By contrast, bureaucratic
forms and legal texts would be on the tight, conservative end, given their
strongly prescribed conventions and the likely negative consequences of
breaking them.

Task 7.2 Baggy versus tight genres

This task gives you an opportunity to rank the relative bagginess of different
genres in terms of the amount of creativity they readily allow, or not.

1 Place each of the following genres along the baggy–tight continuum below.
 Exploring future issues 171

Baggy<=――――――――――――――――――――=>Tight
Birth certificates
University lectures
Online blog posts
Sympathy cards
Job advertisements
Novels
Eulogies
Restaurant menus
Job termination letters
Church newsletters
Laboratory reports
Conference papers
YouTube videos

2 From your continuum above, what factors do you notice determine whe-
ther a genre is baggy or tight?
3 Do either a or b.

a Select one of the genres above and find an example of a playful text
within that genre (i.e., a text that stretches or mixes conventions in
that genre).
b Parody is a form of genre play that may occur in even very tight genres,
as we have seen with RA parodies. Find a parody of one of the genres
above or another genre. Try searching the internet for “parody of
______________” (fill in the blank with the genre of your choice).
What aspects of this genre does the parody exaggerate or mock?

Authority of the genre player

Another factor determining whether genre play is viewed as effective is the
perceived legitimacy of the genre player to innovate. Tardy (2016), drawing
on Bourdieu’s (1991) economic model of language use, points out that the
right to innovate is earned over time as individuals produce texts (probably
following genre conventions closely) that are accepted by others as appro-
priate and valuable. Their valued discourse then grants them the social
“capital” to playfully break genre conventions (Tardy, 2016, p. 36). The
influence of this accumulated capital is seen, among other places, in aca-
demic writing, where “many examples of innovation … come from authors
who have already established their linguistic and disciplinary competence and
who hold relatively high status within their field” (Tardy, 2016, p. 36).
I recently came across an example of earned authority licensing genre play—
this time in a spoken civic text. On June 26, 2015, U.S. president Barack Obama
172 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Figure 7.1 “The President Honors the Life of Reverend Clementa Pinckney”
(screenshot)
Source: The Obama White House, YouTube (26 June 2015). Available at www.you
tube.com/watch?v=rRvBzzR5tdA.

delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state
senator and pastor, who was one of nine African Americans killed by a white
supremacist gunman at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church. President Obama’s discourse, delivered at Reverend Pinckney’s funeral
in South Carolina and televised nationally (see screenshot in Figure 7.1), was
very well received, even though (or maybe because) it was innovative in its
mixing of and playing with several genres, including the eulogy, the religious
sermon, and the presidential speech.
In eulogy-like sections of his address, such as in the following excerpt,
Obama described Pinckney’s personal qualities, legacy, and contributions:

Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean, nor

small. He conducted himself quietly, and kindly, and diligently … He
was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s
shoes and see through their eyes. No wonder one of his senate colleagues
remembered Senator Pinckney as “the most gentle of the 46 of us—the best
of the 46 of us.”

Yet at other points, Obama uses sermon-like discourse. He opens his

remarks that day, for example, with a religious salutation and invokes the
Bible on hope and faith, to the approving applause of his audience: “Giving
all praise and honor to God. [Applause.] The Bible calls us to hope. To
persevere, and have faith in things not seen.”
In other sections of his text as well, Obama, as a preacher might, calls his
listeners to live better lives in response to God’s grace.
 Exploring future issues 173

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon
us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. [Applause.] …
He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the
most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy
of this gift.

And then at other times, the president moves into the genre of political
speech, as he connects the shooting to broad societal issues such as racism,
voting rights, and gun control.

Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we
don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but
we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a
job interview but not Jamal. [Applause.] So that we search our hearts
when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens
to vote. [Applause.]
For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun vio-
lence inflicts upon this nation. [Applause.]

Finally, President Obama closes his address with still another genre—and
a musical one: He sings the classic Christian hymn Amazing Grace. This
final act of genre mixing surprises and delights the audience, who join him
in singing. (For a complete video of President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend
Pinckney, please see www.c-span.org/video/?c4542228/president-obama-eulo
gy-clementa-pinckney-funeral-service. All of the printed excerpts above
are from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/26/
remarks-president-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementa-pinckney.)
Obama’s hybrid discourse was very well accepted, as evidenced not just
by the immediate audience’s frequent and enthusiastic applause but also by
the follow-up press coverage, which indeed was not uniform in their naming
of the genre of Obama’s text. The Wall Street Journal called it “an impas-
sioned eulogy” (Lee & Nelson, 2015, par. 1), the Los Angeles Times “a
moving address” (Memoli, 2015, par. 2), and Forbes magazine “a standout
speech” that “soared rhetorically and emotionally” (Morgan, 2015, par. 1–2).
This successful reception was undoubtedly due in large part to the sig-
nificant, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘capital’ Obama had that day to play with
certain genres. As an African American Christian, he had authority to use
the moves of a black church sermon in a national address—even in a coun-
try that values the separation of church and state—much more so than, say,
a white and/or nonreligious president, whose mentioning of God’s grace, use
of black religious cadences, or singing of a hymn might be seen as strained
or even offensive attempts at insider-ness. Obama was also in a space—a
funeral attended by many black clergy—that licensed and encouraged him to
invoke his religious identity. At the same time, his position as U.S. president
174 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

legitimized his forays into the political speech genre at a funeral. In fact, it
would have been surprising if, during this nationally televised event, Obama
as president had not spoken on issues affecting the country. Thus, Obama’s
layers of discourse capital—connected to multiple aspects of his identity—
allowed his hybrid text to work in a highly effective manner with a broad
audience of listeners.

Value of the play products

Even when a genre is tight rather than baggy or when the speaker or writer
lacks obvious capital to innovate, genre play may still be successful if the
audience perceives it to produce something of value. Tardy’s student Juan,
for example, could ‘get away with’ being inventive for a serious final course
project at least in part because of the intellectual and creative benefits his
playfulness produced. Indeed, his portfolio won “a university-wide writing
competition” (Tardy, 2016, p. 157). Tardy (2015, 2016) reports on a some-
what similar case in the writing of Frank, an undergraduate in an environ-
mental science research methods course. For this course, Frank composed an
innovative research proposal (on the safety of produce grown on urban
land), whose moves deviated from those that the professor recommended.
Specifically, while the professor told the students that their proposals should
begin with a “big idea” (Tardy, 2015, p. 350) laying out the importance of
their topic, Frank opened his proposal with a specific scene “[o]n the south
side of Chicago” where “unused plots of land are being transformed into
small-scale urban farms” (Tardy, 2016, p. 114). And instead of closing his
introduction with a hypothesis predicting a particular outcome (as the pro-
fessor recommended), Frank indicated that his hypothesis about the safety
of an urban farm’s leafy greens might be incorrect and that, if so, he was
“determined to understand why, and propose solutions to the problem”
(p. 113). Interestingly, despite Frank’s departures from the guidelines, the
professor was very impressed with his proposal, noting that it was one of
the best in the class, not just due its innovativeness but because it demon-
strated a kind of creative thinking valued in science.

Task 7.3 Identifying what makes genre play successful

1 Look back at Task 7.2 and select one of the genres from the list or another
genre.
2 Describe an example (an imaginary example is okay) of how someone
might stretch or mix conventions of that genre. If you did 3a in this task,
you should already have an example.
3 Explain how each of these factors could influence how well an audience
would receive this instance of genre play:
 Exploring future issues 175

 the bagginess of the genre;

 the speaker’s or writer’s capital to play with its conventions;
 the value of what is produced by the play.

The sections above have offered an overview of three strategies of genre

play. Seeing these strategies in action reminds us that genres are more flexible
than we often assume and that stretching, mixing, and parodying them can
achieve multiple outcomes.

Possibilities for future genre play research

Genre play as a scholarly topic is in its relative genesis in ESP studies, and
further research could yield insights of value to ESP practitioners and their
students. One possible long-term project could involve building a public
corpus of genre play exemplars, perhaps called the Corpus of Innovative
Texts or Corpus of Genre Play. Scholars, teachers, and anyone else would
be welcome (and invited) to submit examples they encounter of texts that
depart from genre conventions, along with information about the texts’
contexts. Such a corpus could serve as a great resource for ESP teachers
seeking examples of innovative, genre-pushing texts to show their students.
With these texts, students could also examine patterns in where and why
genre play occurs, looking at, for example, textual dimensions most or
least subject to convention-breaking or the demographic qualities of people
who engage in genre play and how well their play is received and under
what circumstances. Such analysis tasks could prepare students to interpret
genre play in texts they read and listen to, as well as appreciate when they
might engage in it themselves and to what effect. Using digital humanities
technologies, it would also be interesting to create an interactive map of
locations (geographical and/or online) of innovative texts in the corpus.
Map-based projects could then track possible clustering of play texts and
whether these clusters precede the standardization of previously innovative
genre features.

What is genre learning transfer and why study it

Another area for future ESP research is genre learning transfer—that is,
students’ application of what they learn from a genre-based course to new
contexts. Most studies on this topic have measured the impact of students’
classroom-based genre learning in the short-term—for example, right after
a course or lesson sequence. Relatively little is known about how much of this
learning ‘sticks’ or if students are able to apply it to new situations. This
question of the long-term transferability of classroom learning is important,
for it asks us to consider whether our course designs and materials have
176 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

lasting value for students. We hope that they do, but at present there is little
documented evidence to that effect. In the research that does exist on this
issue, two sub-questions have been central: 1) To what extent do students
retain genre knowledge gained in a course? 2) How successfully do they
transfer this knowledge to understanding or producing texts within new
genres? The next section considers scholarship that addresses these questions.

Current observations of genre learning transfer

Retention of genre learning from instruction

In order for students to transfer genre knowledge or awareness, they first
need to be able to hold it in memory, even if only on a subconscious level.
Some research suggests that students are able to do this. In my own study of
an ESL reading course, for instance, I found that students remembered, over
an extended period of time, at least some of the course’s genre-based material
(Hyon, 2001). Eight of my students were interviewed one year after the
course ended, and were prompted to describe genres taught in the course.
Specifically, they were presented with four texts (which they had not seen
before) that represented the four genres covered in class (hard news story,
feature article, textbook, and research article), and for each text they were
asked what they would call that “passage” and why (p. 423). Although students
did not always remember the class names for these texts (particularly
the news genres), they did mention specific genre features discussed in the
course (e.g., the feature article’s opening anecdote, the textbook’s author-
itative language, and the RA’s introductory gap move), and they could point
out these elements in the sample texts during the interview.
In another post-course follow-up study, Charles (2014) found that some
students retained and continued to use specific genre analysis methods they
learned from the course instruction. She surveyed 40 international graduate
students one year after they completed an EAP course that taught them to
build their own corpora of RAs (from their disciplines) and to use corpus tools
like word frequency and collocation lists for examining lexicogrammatical
features. Impressively, 70 percent of the students said that they had used
their personal RA corpus sometime in the year following the course; and 38
percent of them were “regular users” of their corpus (consulting it once a
week or more) (p. 34). Some users also found the corpus analysis tools
particularly helpful for learning how to use English grammatical patterns
and vocabulary in their own research writing. One enthusiastic student
commented, “It’s such fun to make different queries. It’s like having a lovely
friend with you who can advise you anytime you want” (Charles, 2014,
p. 37). Some students also continued to build their corpora after the course;
one, in fact, created a corpus with 640 research papers, and another who
was conducting an interdisciplinary research investigation, developed three
 Exploring future issues 177

corpora of RAs from three fields in order to understand terminological dif-

ferences across these disciplines. Thus, these students were able to retain
and apply the course’s genre analysis techniques (and specifically, corpus
tools skills) over a substantial amount of time.

Transfer of genre learning to new texts and situations

Although it is helpful to see that, in at least these two studies, students held
on to genre knowledge and text analysis strategies they had gained in a
course, a still pressing question is whether students can transfer such course
learning to navigating genres that are brand new to them. If the answer to
this question is yes, then genre-based instruction has potentially long-lasting
benefits for students, preparing them to understand and use many different
kinds of texts in the future—way beyond those covered in the course.

High-road vs. low-road transfer

To explore the transferability of classroom-acquired genre knowledge,
researchers in ESP and, even more so, Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have
returned to transfer of learning scholarship from the late 1980s, and parti-
cularly that of educational psychologists David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon
(Beaufort, 2007; Brent, 2011, Johns, 2011; Reiff & Bawarshi, 2011). Perkins
and Salomon’s work is concerned not only with whether learners can
transfer previous knowledge to novel contexts but also whether they can do
it wisely and effectively. Specifically, they examine learners’ engagement in
high-road transfer, a process involving “deliberate mindful abstraction of
skill or knowledge from one context for application in another” (Perkins &
Salomon, 1988, p. 25). Although they developed this concept in relation to
all types of learning (and not particularly genre learning), their “deliberate”
and “mindful” descriptors allow us to envision someone, such as an ESP
student, making conscious choices regarding if and when to transfer prior
knowledge about one genre to another genre. For example, we might ima-
gine a professor learning to give a TED Talk (see Chapter 2). This professor
could make thoughtful, i.e., ‘high-road’, decisions about what she should or
should not transfer from the university lecture genre that she already knows.
She might mindfully decide to incorporate into her TED Talk anecdotes, as
she does in her lectures, but at the same time to forgo her usual introductory
outline of points, given the TED Talk time constraints and the importance
of surprise in this genre.
Salomon and Perkins distinguish this conscious high-road transfer process
from low-road transfer, or “the spontaneous, automatic transfer of highly
practiced skills, with little need for reflective thinking” (Salomon & Perkins,
1989, p. 118). While low-road transfer is not necessarily bad transfer, as it
facilitates quick, mindless application of skills across two similar situations
178 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

(e.g., chopping a carrot and chopping a zucchini), reflective and selective

high-road transfer is needed across distant contexts, such as across two
different genres.

Adaptive transfer
A somewhat similar concept to high-road transfer is what DePalma and
Ringer (2011) call adaptive transfer: the “conscious or intuitive process of
applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in new and potentially
unfamiliar writing situations” (p. 141, emphasis added). (Their definition
could apply to speaking situations as well.) Like high-road transfer, adaptive
transfer is needed between two situations where the speaker or writer
should apply some (but not all) skills and knowledge from one situation to
another. However, unlike Perkins and Salomon’s “mindful” descriptor of
high-road transfer, adaptive transfer, as DePalma and Ringer describe it,
may be either conscious or “intuitive” (p. 141). Thus, in this view, the uni-
versity professor learning to give a TED Talk might have varying degrees of
consciousness of how she is adapting her previous lecture genre knowledge
to fit the new TED Talk genre. What is important to DePalma and Ringer is
that adaptive transfer involves transforming previously learned knowledge
for the new context, rather than just reusing this knowledge in the same
form in which it was learned.

Investigations of high-road, adaptive transfer of genre knowledge

Although relatively little research has assessed students’ abilities to transfer
genre knowledge adaptively, a few studies have, and point to ways that ESP
courses might prepare students to be effective genre knowledge ‘transformers’.
I offer brief snapshots of four such studies here—three of which explore
how students transfer genre knowledge learned in academic contexts, like
their university courses, to workplace contexts. Brent (2012) observes that
this is transfer with “the most long-term consequences for students” (p. 561).
These investigations also allow us to imagine how transfer may happen across
other domains—such as from spoken to written communications, from the
everyday to the academic, and from one workplace to another.

PARKS (2001): TWEAKING PRIOR GENRE KNOWLEDGE

Parks (2001) studied French Canadian nurses learning a new version of a

genre they had learned before. As such, the transfer ‘distance’ was not
radical: The new nurses were learning to write ‘care plans’ in Anglophone
hospitals where they worked, after having previously written care plans in
their Francophone university nursing programs. Still, because of differences
between the two care plan varieties, they needed to adapt their prior
 Exploring future issues 179

knowledge and not just transfer it low-road style. What helped them to do
this was observing the Anglophone hospital care plans while doing their
rounds and collaborating on their plans with more experienced nurses.
Through such activities, they recognized that the Anglophone hospital care
plans allowed for, among other things, simpler diagnostic sections and use
of medical diagnostic terms (e.g., diabetes) not permitted in their university
nursing programs, where such language had been seen as the purview of the
doctors.

SMART AND BROWN (2002): ADAPTING GENERAL GENRE PRINCIPLES

When the transfer distance between a course and an outside context is large,
specific genre knowledge may not be transferable, though broad genre prin-
ciples still can be. In their study of undergraduates completing workplace
internships, for instance, Smart and Brown (2002) found that students suc-
cessfully applied such principles and did so in a transformative, adaptive
fashion. Specifically, their 24 undergraduate professional writing majors
were able to apply concepts and skills they had learned in their writing
coursework, such as “reader-centered writing” and research strategies, to
new genres in their internships (p. 130). One intern noted, for example, that
focusing on such ideas helped him to write to his expert readership, which
included tech-savvy clients at a financial institution. In an interview for
Smart and Brown’s study, he said: “We’re not writing to the everyday guy,
Joe Day-Trader. So with the whole concept of reader-centered writing—we
have to remember that we’re writing for advanced to expert-level programmers
and people like that” (from Smart & Brown, 2002, p. 130).
And students were able to adapt these rhetorical concepts for their
worksites fairly quickly. As Smart and Brown note, “[t]ypically the interns were
not given an opportunity to rehearse the genres in which they were working … ;
rather, they were almost immediately placed in situations where they were
expected to contribute as practitioners competent enough to accomplish
significant work assignments” (p. 122). Similar to what Parks found with the
nurses in the hospital setting, what helped the interns to apply and adapt
previously learned genre principles were interactions with co-workers and
time spent reviewing company documents to learn about their sites’ cultural
norms.

BRENT (2012): APPLYING GENRE SURVIVAL SKILLS FROM ALL OF LIFE

When faced with new genres, students may transfer a mix of different types
of knowledge from both prior instruction and other life experiences. Brent
(2012) found this to be the case in his study of Canadian undergraduates
completing a workplace internship. Out of the six interns he studied (from a
variety of disciplines), four of them had taken or were taking a professional
180 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

communication course that focused on workplace genres. Interestingly,

however, these four students, in their interviews with Brent, referenced this
course as a source of only some of the genre knowledge and skills relevant
to their internships, for which they wrote such varied texts as client surveys,
news article summaries, church Sunday school lesson plans, control audits,
and strategic marketing plans. In particular, the students, like those in Smart
and Brown’s study, indicated that from the professional communications
course, they transferred broad abilities and knowledge, such as conciseness
and awareness that workplace texts are organized hierarchically. Much of
what the interns transferred, though, came not from just this single course
but from the whole of their educational and other life experiences, which
gave them what Brent calls “rhetorical survival instincts” (p. 586). For example,
their experience with writing assignments in their degree programs primed
them to seek out models for new genres in their workplaces, to tweak those
models as needed, and to think about their audiences. One of the interns
had also juggled school with work and other activities, giving her skills in
personal organization and task management. Others also had experience
with flexible maneuvering across multiple genres. In sum, says Brent, “the
students seemed to be transferring not so much specific knowledge and skills
as a general disposition to make rhetorical judgments” (p. 589)—a disposition
developed out the totality of their experience.

REIFF AND BAWARSHI (2011): CROSSING GENRE BOUNDARIES LIKE A NOVICE

In the three studies above, all of the participants seemed able to transfer
their previous genre knowledge or rhetorical strategies adaptively and effec-
tively. Some individuals, though, may be better prepared (or naturally more
inclined) to do this than others. Reiff and Bawarshi (2011) found this to be
so among undergraduates in a first-year written composition (FYC) course.
In studying how these students applied knowledge from secondary school,
work, or everyday experiences to their FYC texts, they found that some
engaged in high-road transfer where they selectively drew on strategies (such
as analyzing a text, defending a stance, or using a quotation) from genres
they had written before. These learners Reiff and Bawarshi called “boundary
crossers,” able to “repurpose” their antecedent genre knowledge so that it
could cross over “for use in new contexts” (p. 325). Other students, however,
did not adapt previously learned strategies and instead low-road transferred
in whole genres, like the five-paragraph essay, even when these did not fit
the FYC assignment. These “boundary guarders” seemed to hold on to their
previous textual understandings “even in the face of new and disparate
tasks” (p. 325).
Given that ideally our students would become nimble boundary crossers,
it is interesting to note what Reiff and Bawarshi observed about these
crossers as learners. Contrary to what we might expect, in their interviews
 Exploring future issues 181

these students “expressed a lack of confidence in approaching the [FYC]

writing task based on their prior genre knowledge” and instead assumed the
role of a beginner needing to figure out the new FYC genres (p. 325).
Reflecting this humble orientation, the boundary crossers also used a lot of
what Reiff and Bawarshi call “not talk” (p. 329) to describe their FYC texts—
that is, commenting on what antecedent genres the FYC texts were not like
(e.g., not like their high school term papers). In their cautious approach,
these students were “mindful of the need for reinventing and reimagining
[their prior] strategies” (p. 326). By contrast, the boundary-guarding stu-
dents were much more confident in—and clung tightly to—their prior
genres, making them more susceptible to low-road transfer that did not fit
the FYC tasks. In light of these two learner profiles, Reiff and Bawarshi
recommended that teachers encourage their students to adopt “the role of
novice” so that they remain open to using, repurposing, and moving away
from prior genre knowledge as the context demands (p. 330). They also
suggest that teachers incorporate assignments “that invite students to mix
genres and modalities … and then to reflect afterward on the experience of
crossing between genres and domains”—in other words, tasks that compel
students to re-think and adapt their previous genre understandings (p. 332).
Taken together, the four studies above suggest that as students are faced
with learning new genres, they are able to transfer and transform previous
knowledge and skills (some specific and some general) gained through
instruction. But what enables them to engage in high-road, adaptive transfer
may go beyond a single course and include mentoring from experts in the
new context, rhetorical ‘street smarts’ developed over time, and the orientation
of a beginner.

Possibilities for future genre learning transfer research

Regarding future ESP research, several transfer-related topics could be use-
fully explored, with relevance for genre-based teaching. I consider two such
topics below.

Over-transfer of genre knowledge

One interesting question for ESP researchers to take up is how over-transfer
functions in students’ development as genre users. Freedman (1994) has
argued that genre-based instruction creates a potential “risk of overlearning
or misapplication” of genre information (p. 195). And, indeed, such mis-
application has been observed in students moving from secondary school to
discipline-specific writing courses (Artemeva & Fox, 2010), from under-
graduate to graduate coursework (Bangeni, 2013), and from academic pro-
grams to workplace contexts (Devitt, 2007; Hafner, 2013). In considering
these transitional situations, one wonders whether students’ over-transfer
182 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

problematically interferes with them learning genres in the new context or is

a natural (and even beneficial) part of that learning. Addressing this ques-
tion, Devitt (2007) reflects on over-transfer she has observed among new law
firm associates. Although the novice associates over-apply aspects of their
law school genres (such as detailed law descriptions) when writing profes-
sional analytical memoranda, the least successful associates (interestingly)
are not the over-transferers but those “who never mastered the genres of law
school … [and] do not control the genres upon which they might draw” for
their professional legal writing (Devitt, 2007, p. 221). From this and other
instances of mis-transfer, it would seem that having some relevant genre
knowledge (even if it does not fit perfectly with the new situation) at least
allows one an initial ‘way into’ learning a new genre. Future studies could
investigate under what conditions over-transfer does or does not have these
facilitative effects for genre learning, as well as how ESP instruction might
be designed to encourage these effects while also helping students learn to
notice and ‘correct’ their transfer errors over time.

Impact of genre play on transfer abilities

Future ESP studies might also examine connections between genre learning
transfer and genre play. One question worth exploring here is whether integrat-
ing genre play into ESP courses develops students’ skill in high-road adaptive
transfer of prior genre knowledge. Below I discuss several reasons why it might.
Research indicates that play develops flexibility and an ability to adapt to
new situations. Animal biologists, in fact, have found that young mammals
that play (as seen in their exaggerated, mock-fighting movements) acquire
survival skills. To take just a few examples of this phenomenon, juvenile
ground squirrels show motor skill gains when they play (Nunes et al., 2004);
young rats who wrestle have improved brain development and social skills
acquisition (Pellis, Pellis, & Bell, 2010); and playful brown bear cubs boast a
higher survival rate than their less playful counterparts (Fagen & Fagen,
2009). Offering insights into reasons behind such developmental benefits,
biologists Spinka, Newberry, and Bekoff (2001) hypothesize that play gives
animals practice with “atypical movements necessary for recovery from
awkward positions” and with responding to being “surprised or temporarily
disoriented or disabled” (p. 143). Similarly, Stuart Brown, founder of the
National Institute of Play, says that through play, animals “explore options
that they wouldn’t otherwise explore if they hadn’t played” and “take in
novelty and newness, use it to adapt and become more flexible, and also
have a good time in the process” (Brown, 2015). In other words, play prepares
animals (including humans) to cope with unfamiliar situations.
Some scholarship also suggests that, for humans, play has benefits for
language development (Cook, 2000). Breaking language rules for fun and
entertainment, for example, may help second language learners stay open to
 Exploring future issues 183

growth in their ‘interlanguage’—that is, their emerging grammar for the

target language (Tardy, 2016; Tarone, 2002). And language play that involves
‘double-voicing’, a process by which learners engage in different language
varieties of and identities in the second language (Broner & Tarone, 2001),
could develop learners’ sociolinguistic agility.
If play builds such skills and sensitivities, then classroom instruction that
encourages genre play may help students become astute transferers and
transformers of genre knowledge. Specifically, play could give them practice
with how to respond flexibly and aptly with relevant prior knowledge when
‘surprised or temporarily disoriented or disabled’ by new genres or contexts.
In my own first-year undergraduate writing course, I have seen how genre
play assignments can accomplish this. In one assignment, designed by my
colleague Parastou Feiz, students write a ‘chemical love story’ that requires
them to mix different genre moves and writerly voices. Specifically, the
assignment prompt tells them to compose a love story that views the lovers
and their story from the perspective (i.e., paradigm) of a scientist, and while
telling their story, to incorporate sources that address the neurobiological
nature of love—but in a fun way in order to keep their audience entertained
(see Hyon, 2015, p. 92 for Feiz’s complete prompt). After they work through
several scaffolding activities and drafts of their stories, I find that a number
of the students are quite successful at transferring in and blending what they
know about romantic narrative and research-based exposition to create their
hybrid texts. Two excerpts below from a chemical love story by first-year
undergraduate Kristy Plascencia illustrates some creative ways students
respond to this task. A quick synopsis first of Kristy’s story: The protago-
nists, Adam and Melinda, meet at a club, fall in love and get married,
despite the meddling of Melinda’s sister Belinda.

Belinda noticed her sister’s continuous staring … Belinda walked up to

her sister and told her, “Melinda, you are experiencing high levels of
dopamine in your brain. Try to control your brain chemicals and snap
out of it.” … Melinda said, “There you go again with your biological
sayings. Are you going to tell me again that you read in a biology book
some sort of theory relating brain chemicals and love?” “Indeed,”
Belinda began. “I once read a chapter called ‘Chemistry of Love’ by
Helen Fisher and she said ‘Elevated levels of Dopamine in the brain
produce extremely focused attention’” (24). Belinda was a graduate
student working on her biochemistry master’s degree. It was common
for her to read biology books under every circumstance.
[…]
… Today they are now how Melinda hoped. Like a Prairie Vole, the
couple “prefer[s] to spend time with each other” … rather than going
out to the club. They also “groom each other for hours on end and nest
together” (I get a kick out of you, par. 3).
184 ESP genre-based learning and teaching

Other scholarship has also reported positive student response to playful

tasks with genre parodies (Swales, 2004) and multimodal projects (Alexander
& Rhodes, 2014; Ellis, 2013; Hafner, 2014; Tardy, 2016). Tardy (2016), for
example, describes a successful unit in which her graduate students learned
to create “video abstracts,” an emerging research genre in which scholars
present visual summaries of their work that both resemble and depart
from traditional research abstracts (p. 153). Her students examine sample
video abstracts alongside “other related and antecedent genres, such as
print abstracts, video course descriptions, short TED Talks, animated
journal articles, and video book summaries”; and discuss the “social
actions” that video abstracts perform (p. 153). They then get a chance to
create their own video abstracts, reflecting on both the challenges and
advantages of “re-packag[ing]” their research with mixed media resources
(pp. 153–154).
A delightful video abstract I viewed on the YouTube channel for Cell
Press (see Figure 7.2) demonstrates mixing possibilities for this genre. In this
abstract, the authors (Rao et al., 2014a) use an eight-minute live animation
video with colorful origami objects to explain their findings about genome
‘folds’ in animal cells.
In terms of adaptive transfer, the researchers include some moves from
their print article abstract (Rao et al., 2014b) while also adding non-verbal
elements (like origami animals moving to ragtime music) that would appeal
to the broad YouTube audience.

Figure 7.2 “A 3D Map of the Human Genome” (screenshot)

Source: cellvideoabstracts, S. Rao, et al., YouTube (11 Dec. 2014). Available at www.
youtube.com/watch?v=dES-ozV65u4.
 Exploring future issues 185

Student work on tasks like the chemical love story and video abstracts
suggests that as students innovate with genres, they gain experience with
transforming previous knowledge. Yet no scholarship to my knowledge has
formally assessed the long-term benefits of this experience. Future investi-
gations along these lines might compare groups of students who receive
genre-based instruction with and without play activities. At the end of the
instruction, the play and no-play groups could be evaluated on their per-
formance in a task requiring adaptive high-road transfer to an unfamiliar
genre. A more challenging but perhaps even more interesting investigation
could follow the play and no-play students longitudinally after they leave
the class, and observe how well they do adapting genre knowledge to new
situations in their academic courses, workplaces, or other life contexts.
I hope that you have enjoyed this book and from it gained a sense of the
evolution of ESP genre work, ESP approaches to genre analysis, and possi-
bilities for incorporating genre into ESP course designs and materials. I also
hope that, in working through various tasks in the chapters, you have
developed confidence and inspiration for trying out your own genre analyses
or creating your own teaching materials. Perhaps you will as well consider
how to investigate students’ genre learning in your classroom and beyond.
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Index

academic genres: critiques of 115–18; Bosher, S. 146–7, 148–9

networking 139–40; parodies of 168 Brazil, genre work in 23
adaptive transfer 178, 181, 184 Brent, D. 178, 179–80
advertising 13, 165, 167 British Academic Written English
Ahmad, U. K. 47 Corpus (BAWE) 58–9
Amnesty International genre 83–4 Brown, N. 179
Angouri, J. 157 Brown, P. 64
annotations 160–1 Brown, Stuart 182
apology emails 147 business genres 66–8, 108, 138–9, 157;
Artemeva, N. 144–5 see also workplace
Ashmore, M. 166
Askehave, I. 14, 17, 22 Canagarajah, A. S. 165–6
assessing course materials 159–62 CARS (moves model) 10–12, 17, 27, 30
Atkinson, D. 47 Casanave, C. P. 116
audit reports 90–1 Charles, M. 158, 176
Auerbach, E. 141–2 Cheng, A. 102, 160–1, 162
Australian arts theses 45 citation language 52–4
authority, and genre play 171–4 Coe, Richard 22
aviation 122 Cohen, M. A. 30–4
Collin, R. 83–4
backchannels 67–8 collocations 58–9
banking 96 combining course design 128–9
Barber, C. L. 6 communicative purpose 7, 12–17, 29–31
bargaining genre 37–8 concept matrix 152, 153–4
Basturkmen, H. 107–8 concordances 59, 138–9
Bawarshi, A. 17, 20, 116, 123, 142, conference presentations, Finland 62
180–1 Connor, U. 71–2
Bednarek, M. 60 contexts see genre contexts
Bekoff, M. 182 controlled text production 145–7
Belcher, D. D. 103, 116 corpus tools 54–62, 138–9, 158, 175,
Benesch, S. 104–5, 110, 115, 126 176–7
Berkenkotter, C. 81 Create a Research Space (CARS)
Best, Nancy 125–6 see CARS
Bex, T. 168 critical ethnography 96–8
Bhatia, V. K. 165, 167 critical genre pedagogy 116–18, 128,
Biber, D. 71–2 140–3
birthmother letter 31–2 cross-cultural lexicogrammatical
book reviews 68–9, 133–8 comparisons 62, 68–9
 Index 203

cross-cultural moves comparisons 41–7 Fredrickson, K. M. 47

crystallization, data 94–5 Freedman, A. 21–2, 181
Curry, M. J. 85, 97, 139–40 fundraising letters 71–2

Daily Show, The 169–70 Gavioli, L. 138–9

data (qualitative) analysis 94–6 Gawron, J. M. 16
data (qualitative) collection 86–93 genre, defined 3–4
DePalma, M-S. 178 genre, early work in 5–19
Deroey, K. L. B. 70 genre acquisition/awareness 113–15
Devitt, A. J. 114–15, 118, 120, 123, genre contexts 14–15, 74–98, 139–42
141, 142; on medical histories 116; genre learning transfer 175–85; new
over-transfer 182 texts and situations 177–9;
DeWalt, B. R. 94 over-transfer 181–2; and play 182–5;
DeWalt, K. M. 94 retention 176–7; studies 178–81
dignity interviews 84 genre metaphors 16–17
discourse communities 12, 15–16 genre play 163–75; and authority 171–4;
discourse organization 8–9, 10; see also corpus tools for 175; flexibility of
moves analysis 170–1; and learning transfer 182–5;
Dovey, T. 152, 153–4 mixing 166–8, 183; parody 168–70,
Downey Bartlett, N. J. 109–10 184; stretching 164–6; value of 174–5
Dunn, C. D. 165 genre systems/chains 80–2
Dupuy, B. 148, 149 genre user experiences 78–80
genre-based teaching 5, 21–2, 168–70;
ELT Journal 168–9 ESP course design 112–29; lesson
email genre 102, 147, 161 materials 130–62; role of instruction
emic and etic perspectives 96 in 101–3
engineering 123, 127, 128, 144–5 Gimenez, J. 120
English book reviews 68–9 grant funding 80–1
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) 6, Grujicic-Alatriste, L. 118
104, 115–16, 139 Gunesekera, M. 77–8
English for Science and Technology
(EST) 5–9 Hafner, C. A. 46–7, 123–5
environmental science 43–5 Halliday, Michael 20
ESP, and genre 4–5, 9 Handford, M. 67–8
ESP course design 112–29 hedges (politeness strategies) 65
ethics 141–2 Herbert, A. J. 6–7
ethnography 85–6, 91–3, 96–8 Herbolich, J. B. 123
eulogy 172–4 Higgins, L. 128
evaluative language, book reviews 136–8 high-road transfer 177, 180, 181
historical investigation, contexts 93
Facebook 148 Holliday, A. 42–3
face/Face-Threatening Acts 64 hotel maids, language needs 111
Feak, C. B. 120, 145, 147, 150–1, 157 human rights activism 83–4
Fernández-Polo, F. J. 62 Hunston, S. 137
field notes 92–3 Hutchinson, T. 5, 104, 119
film reviews 101–2 Hyland, K. 59, 65–6, 69, 113, 131, 137;
Fisher, D. 128 on genre contexts 75
Fisher, Helen 132–3
Flower, L. 128 individual education plans (IEPs) 141
Flowerdew, J. 90–1 informed consent 94
food service encounters 109–10 internships 179–80
Fox, J. 144–5 interpretive text production 148–9
204 Index

interviews 86–9, 161 mission statements 75–8, 93

IRAC (move pattern) 46–7 modal auxiliaries 71–2
Itakura, H. 68–9 moves analysis: CARS 10–12, 17, 27,
Italian letter moves 41–2 30; and communicative purposes
29–31; course materials 131, 133–7;
Japan/Japanese: book reviews 68–9; EFL cross-cultural approach 41–7; dance
instruction 102; wedding speeches 165 analogy 27–8; functional units 28–9;
Jasso-Aguilar, R. 111 and lexicogrammar 69–73; simplified
Johns, A. M. 4, 22, 115, 126–7, 139, 35; in spoken genres 35–8
157, 158 Myers, G. 65
Jolliffe, D. A. 127
needs/rights analysis 103–12
Keivanloo-Shahrestanaki, Z. 102 Negretti, R. 102
keywords 57–8 networking, academic 139–40
Koester, A. 66–7 Newberry, R. C. 182
Kuteeva, M. 102 news programs, and genre parody
169–70
Lackstrom, J. 7, 8 N-grams 59–60
language development, and play 182–3 nursing 113, 120, 146–7, 148–9, 178–9
law 46–7, 182 Nwoye, O. G. 17
learning see genre-based teaching
lectures: introductions 36–7, 48; listen- Obama, Barack 82–3, 171–4
ing to 152–5; and student rights 110; obituaries 16–17
Wh-clefts 70; see also TED Talks observations, contexts 89–93
Lee, J. J. 48, 158 Orr, W. W. F. 37–8
legacy documents 84
lesson materials 130–62; assessment of Pang, T. T. T. 101–2
159–62; consciousness-raising 131–44; Parks, S. 178–9
process activities 149–55; sequencing parody 168–70, 184
tasks 155–6; text production tasks participant observation 91–2
144–9; text selection 156–9 Partington, A. 69–70
letters, cross-cultural comparisons 41–2 Peck, W. C. 128
Levinson, S. C. 64 Pecorari, D. 52–4
lexicogrammatical analysis 20–1, 23, Pennycook, A. 115–16
51–73, 131, 137–9; corpus tools for Perkins, David 177–8
54–62; manual approaches 51–4; personal statements 38–41
moves analysis 69–72 Pinckney, Clementa 172–4
Lillis, T. 85, 89–90, 97, 139–40 Plascencia, Kirsty 183
linguistic politeness strategies 63–8 play see genre play
linked courses 126–7 police genres 107–8, 114
listening and speaking materials 152–5 politeness 63–8
literature reviews, revision and synthesis political speeches 82–3, 171–4
150–2 portfolio assessment 159–60
Louhiala-Salminen, L. 108 process activities 149–55
low-road transfer 177–8, 180, 181 project-focused courses 123–6
psychotherapy notes, intertextual links 81
Madison, D. S. 96
Malaysian journals 47 qualitative data 86–93, 94–6
Malinowski, Bronislaw 91
medical histories 116 racial/cultural prejudice in scholarship 97
Michelson, K. 148, 149 Reiff, M. J. 17, 20, 116, 123, 141, 142,
Miller, Carolyn 20 180–1
 Index 205

Reinhart, S. M. 120, 147 suicide notes 16

religious discourse 17, 172–3 Swales, John 5, 7–16, 17, 28, 30, 47;
research articles (RAs) 5, 9–10; analysis corpus tools 158; genre contexts 22;
tasks 102; citation language 52–4; literature reviews 150–1; mission
and genre play 164, 165–6, 168–9; statements 75–7, 93; on move
introduction moves 43–5, 69; variation 135; production tasks
politeness strategies 65–6, 69; 145–6; on project-focused design
production tasks 145–6; video 123; text selection 157–8; textography
abstracts 184 85–6, 95
rhetorical consciousness-raising 131–44 Swan, M. 168–9
rhetorical genre studies (RGS) 5, 7, Swedish journals 47
19–20, 23, 177 Sydney School 5, 19, 20–2, 23
rights, student 104–5, 106, 110 systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) 20–1
Ringer, J. M. 178
Rogers, P. S. 75–8, 93 Tardy, C. M. 80–1, 101, 102, 105, 145,
Rohlck, T. N. 120, 147 156; course assessment 162; genre
romance genre 122–3, 129, 132–3, 183 metaphors 17; genre play 163–4,
Russell, D. R. 128 165–6, 167–8, 170, 171, 174;
multimodal projects 184; weddings 4
Salehzadeh, J. 150–5, 157 Tarone, E. 9
Salomon, G. 177–8 Tauber, Juan 167–8, 174
Samraj, B. 11, 16, 43–4, 52 teacher-created texts 157–8
Santos, T. 117 teaching, genre-based see genre-based
scaffolded text production 147 teaching
Schryer, C. F. 84 TED Talks 49–50, 69–70, 133, 177
science, English for 123–5 television series, discourse 60
second language acquisition 131, text production tasks 144–9; controlled
182–3 145–7; interpretive 148–9; literature
Secor, M. 169 reviews 150–2; scaffolded 147
Selinker, L. 7, 8 text reassembly 133–5
sequencing activities 155–6 text selection 156–9
service learning 127 textography 85–6, 95
Shawcross, P. 122 theme-focused courses 122–3
Shulman, M. 120 Thompson, G. 137
site simulation 127–8 Tomlinson, B. 144
site-focused courses 126–8 triangulation/crystallization of data 94–5
Smart, G. 96, 179 Trimble, L. 7, 8
social actions 20, 82–4
social media, and genre play 164 undergraduate writing 22, 113, 114–15,
sociology of scientific knowledge 166 118, 122–3, 129; consciousness-raising
Sokal, Alan 169 141; different genres 132–3; genre
specialist informants, moves analysis play 183
38–41 Upton, T. A. 30–4, 71–2
Spinka, M. 182
spoken genres: linguistic analysis 62–3, van Willigen, J. 91–2
66–8; moves analysis 35–8; see also Vergaro, C. 41–2
TED Talks video abstracts 184
stance features, letters 71–2 Virtual Learning Environment
Starfield, S. 93, 97 (VLE) 128
student newsletter (high school) 128
student rights 104–5, 106, 110 Wallerstein, N. 141–2
student-generated texts 158–9 Walsh, L. 169
206 Index

Walter, C. 168–9 work order genre 83, 94

Wan, A. 90–1 workplace: confrontation exercise
Wardle, Elizabeth 118, 123 148–9; internship studies 179–80;
“Washington School” of ESP 7 politeness strategies 66–8
Waters, A. 5, 104, 119
website project 126 Yang, M. L. 77–8
weddings 3–4, 165 Yasuda, S. 102, 161–2
Wh-clefts 70 Yayli, D. 102, 119
wildcard function 59 YouTube, genre mixing 184
Winsor, D. A. 20, 83, 94 YouTube, science video 123–5
Witte, S. 14
word frequency 55–7 Zare, J. 102