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Specific Purposes
Sunny Hyon
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 Sunny Hyon
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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
Introduction
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Chapter 1
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.
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.
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:
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
some way. The linguistic signals of this move often include negative sen-
tence connectors, verbs, and adjectives, as in the following sentence:
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
TV commercial genre
(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.
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?
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.
Teaching materials
Early materials: Grammatical pattern practice
Later materials: Analysis and production of larger discourse segments