This section will try to unravel the complexity of the concept of genre. Genre is commonly identified as “a class of communicative events” (Swales, 1990, 58) characterized by a shared “set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs” (Bhatia, 1993, 13). In other words, applying genre knowledge in writing is a goal-oriented, purposeful activity (Bazerman, 1988; Johns, 2002a; Martin, 1992) to provide linguistic solutions to a perceived problem, such as filling a knowledge gap, or highlighting problem areas in a field of study. Genre knowledge is, in this sense, strategic knowledge, involving both form and content knowledge that a writer may use as a repertoire of options for presenting ideas (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1991; Bhatia, 1993). Knowledge and use of genres by experts is often tacit and for the most part acquired through participation in social interactions without explicit instruction (Freedman & Adam, 1996). Consequently, applying and teaching the conventions of a genre to those who intend to become members of a discourse community may be seriously challenging. Shared formal or structural linguistic features of texts in recurrent social interactions provide clues to the reader to recognize how the message transmitted by the text is to be interpreted, that is, to identify its communicative goal (Bazerman, 1988; Swales, 1990; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993). In this way, genre is “socially constructed” (Johns, 2002a, 12), it requires the awareness of both the reader and writer to successfully achieve its intended goal. As Parry (1998) concludes, “language may [...] be seen as reflecting disciplinary culture in its broadest sense” (274). Successful instances of a genre receive acceptance and social recognition by the target discourse community. Schryer (1995 as cited in Adam & Artemeva, 2002, 181) even uses genre as a verb: “we genre our way through social interactions”. In Figure 3 the events, processes, the discourse participants’ knowledge, and activities are represented in a cycle to demonstrate how the dynamics of genre-related activities embraces nearly all aspects of academic life discussed so far.

 

 

Knowledge of genre is essential for socialization or acceptance into the discourse community (Berkenkotter et al., 1991). Achieved membership allows reproduction of social structures and academic knowledge and includes “the knowledge of when to follow and when to innovate, neither the knowledge nor the right to do so is equally distributed” (Hyland, 2000, 174). The insider versus outsider (Hyland, 2000, 172) distinction explains how power is exercised by “restricting access” to accomplish social purposes (Johns, 2002a, 12). Sources of change in genre conventions, in Hyland’s (2000) view, are:

Having seen the complexity of what genre entails, it is no wonder that theorists and practitioners (Johns, 2002b) do not seem to agree when it comes to how genres can be described and what the term implies in its classroom application.