The three main concepts that need to be clarified due to the inconsistency regarding their interpretation and use in the literature are: genre, discourse and text. In my interpretation, they can be represented in a somewhat simplified manner as an embedded three-level structure, where text is an element of discourse, which is in turn subsumed under genre, as shown in Figure 1. While the distinction is not clear-cut, the identification of text within the broader concept of discourse is frequent in the literature (e.g., Brown & Yule, 1983; Edmondson, 1981 as cited in Flowerdew, 2001; Hoey, 1991).

 

Text, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), is “any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” (1). Discourse as a broader concept includes text, but it also subsumes the communicative functions it has in a situational context. Genre in Hyland’s terms is “broadly, a way of acting using discourse” (Hyland, 2006, 313). It is the most complex of the three terms, as it brings in the notion of discourse community in which genre is a form of transmitting knowledge in conventional ways and also a tool for reproducing social structures (e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1990). Academic genres (as listed in Hyland, 2006, 550) include communicative events in spoken (e.g., lectures, office hour sessions, peer feedback) or written form (e.g., research articles, reprint requests, textbooks), with their functional names reflecting the situationality of these genres (Grabe, 2002). The recurrence of such communicative events helps to structure the roles of members in disciplinary communities, maintain conventions and traditions to set a framework for a variety of activities. Analysis of EAP relies on the operationalization of common discourse characteristics of texts within a given genre by identifying recurring features, for example, in cohesion and how those features appear in the typical sequence of rhetorical units (or moves, using Swales’ (1990) term).

 

 

Although discourse level characteristics are more technically difficult to identify and analyze than lexical and grammatical features at the text level, in many cases it turns out that “the use of many lexical and grammatical features can only be fully understood through analysis of their functions in larger discourse contexts” (Biber et al., 2005, 106). Discourse in a disciplinary culture varies according to its social practices. Linguistic and rhetorical practices are likewise shaped by the social actions that texts are intended to accomplish (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Hyland, 2000; North, 2005). Importantly for this study, cohesive features are also among the characteristics that were found to vary along disciplinary lines (Lovejoy, 1991). Genre analysis focuses on the study of the combined effects of culture, the writer’s own background, and the specific situation. The situationality of genres is reflected by the functional names given to their forms (Grabe, 2002): scientific research paper, abstract, research proposal, and so on. A more detailed discussion of genres follows in Section 2.4.