Book Reviews

---

Issue 33.1 Spring 2005 (Online Exclusive)

| HTML Printer-Friendly Format |

Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives, edited by Ann M. Johns. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 352 pages.

Reviewed by Janet S. Zepernick, York College of Pennsylvania

North American readers whose understanding of genre theory has been largely shaped by the work growing out of Carolyn Miller’s groundbreaking 1984 article, “Genre as Social Action” (and subsequent developments by Berkenkotter, Huckin, and others) will find in Genre in the Classroom a wide-ranging and informative introduction to other work in genre theory, particularly in the Sydney School, English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes, and applied linguistics. In keeping with the pedagogical emphasis of this collection, Johns has assembled fourteen articles illustrating a wide variety of classroom applications of genre theory designed for use in contexts ranging from high school to graduate school and with both second language learners and native speakers.

            The classroom approaches emphasize the functional and structural aspects of genre to an extent that might initially seem uncomfortably reminiscent of the modes approach of current-traditional rhetoric. That surface-level similarity is misleading, however, and arises largely from the authors’ assumption that although genres are inherently dynamic and fluid, at any given moment they must necessarily be stable enough and fixed enough in form to allow shared recognition by the various members of a discourse community. That moment of fixed and recognizable form provides the starting point for these genre-based pedagogies, all designed to give novice writers access to the kind of insider knowledge of communal norms and conventions—a knowledge that allows experienced members of a discourse community to both recognize and reproduce the types of discourse through which the business of the community is transacted.

            Representing the Sydney School are two chapters, “‘Something to Shoot For’: A Systemic Functional Approach to Teaching Genre in Secondary School Science” and “Heritage and Innovation in Second Language Education.” Readers unfamiliar with the work of the Sydney School—a loose grouping of pedagogical approaches that originated in the work of Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)—will find Susan Feez’s “Heritage and Innovation” a useful starting point. According to Feez, the Sydney School’s approach to genre pedagogy is based on five central principles:

            Readers familiar with recent (and not so recent) trends in the teaching of writing to first language learners in the United States will recognize a number of familiar themes in this list. However, important differences of focus and application that might not be obvious in Feez’s overview become apparent in Macken-Horarik’s much more narrowly focused description of a single instructional unit.

            Macken-Horarik describes a classroom research study of the effects of using explicit instruction about genre as part of the writing component of a unit (on human reproduction) in a high school science class. The unit includes a combination of direct instruction on the science of human reproduction, class discussion of the socio-purposive functions of various scientific genres, explanation and modeling of text types used in communicating various informational elements, observation and discussion of specific syntactic structures and lexical items, and discussion of register as a response to context and audience expectations. This unit’s emphasis on developing students’ awareness of the specific lexical items that belong to the study of human reproduction, the syntactic structures that belong to explanatory text types in the sciences, and register markers that are appropriate for academic and public discourse illustrates the extent to which the Sydney School’s use of genre theory emphasizes the negotiation between the rhetorical and the linguistic elements of text production. Throughout the unit, students are actively encouraged to see formal and linguistic features of the texts as emerging from and responding to the disciplinary and socio-purposive context of communication. So although assessment of student learning is based on finished products and focuses on student’s use of appropriate “discourse units” (and the extent to which the documents they produce embody both field-specific scientific information and characteristic genre features), the message for students is always that the linguistic and formal features that define a genre come into being as the embodiment of a set of site-specific knowledge relations that insiders share.

            If this high school science unit for non-native and academically under-prepared students sounds remarkably similar in goal and method to John Swales’s English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach to teaching academic writing to second language graduate students, it will come as no surprise that Swales and his colleague, Stephanie Lindemann, contribute a fine article entitled “Teaching the Literature Review to International Graduate Students.” Although little here will surprise readers familiar with Swales’s work, this chapter serves as a useful illustration of ESP in action. Grouped with it is Sunny Hyon’s “Genre and ESL Reading: A Classroom Study,” which suggests some of the ways activities designed to increase students’ awareness of the textual features of frequently-encountered genres can help second language students improve their reading comprehension—by helping them build schemas that enable them to recognize the “moves” being made at various points in the text. Although Hyon’s results with this particular group of second language learners are mixed, much here will interest teachers of first language learners who want to develop strategies for improving students’ reading of challenging or unfamiliar genres. In this respect, Hyon’s work and that of William Grabe in “Narrative and Expository Macro-Genres” (on the role of genre knowledge in reading comprehension) seems to be at least a partial response to Jeanne Fahnestock’s call for greater understanding of the interrelation between knowledge and language that allows successful reading to occur.

            In their emphasis on improving reading and writing skills by teaching language learners the things expert readers and writers of the language already know, the pedagogies collected here call to mind the cognitivist approach of Flower and Hayes, who argued in part that the most important difference between novice writers and experienced writers lay in their writing procedures, and that if novice writers could be taught to behave like—and particularly to think about the writing task like—experienced writers, their writing would improve. In the same way, the Sydney School’s approach is based on the belief that the difference between novice writers and experienced writers is what novice writers don’t know about the rhetorical situation and the kinds of linguistic, syntactic, and structural features that such a rhetorical situation calls forth.

            Although the writers collected here do not use the term topoi or, for the most part, the language of classical rhetoric, they all share a strong orientation toward genre analysis as a means of identifying what can be said in specific contexts and about specific subjects. In all of these approaches, analysis of sample texts taken as representative instances of a genre begins from a recognition of context, including both the social-purposive function of the text and audience needs and expectations. The result is that students are constantly made aware of the way in which the combination of context and subject matter produce certain expectations about what will be said and constraints on what can be said. By teaching students to recognize both the communal and the subject-specific forces that shape the sayables of a given case, these approaches represent precisely the kind of fully rhetorical teaching of invention that Sharon Crowley argues has been absent from current traditional rhetoric and its various pedagogies since the end of the 18th century. Readers of this volume will have reason to believe, with Jean Mason, that “genre theory thrives as the most fully elaborated theory of writing to date because it joins the micro level of writing to the macro level of discourse, unites process with product, and connects the individual (cognitivist) to the social (constructionist) approaches. . . . In other words, to a great degree genre theory subsumes, expands, and concretizes the rhetorical theory out of which it grows.”

York, PA

Works Cited
Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Connection and Understanding.” Constructing Rhetorical Education. Ed. Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication. 32.4 (1981): 365-87.

Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1985.

Mason, Jean S. From Gutenberg’s Galaxy to Cyberspace: The Transforming Power of Hypertext. Diss. McGill U., 2000. 14 Jan. 2005.
<http://www.masondissertation.elephanthost.com/genre_theory.htm.>

Miller, Carolyn. R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-76.