28Written communication skills
Abstract: This chapter presents the state of the art of the research on writing skills from a rhetorical and genre perspective. The chapter considers writing instruction in academic contexts and professional writing contexts and focuses on research studies that explore both the cognitive and social dimensions of written communication. It highlights research that examines the development of genre learning in academic and professional contexts, the relationship between genre knowledge and performance, and the ways in which genre knowledge is socially situated and culturally mediated. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodologies in rhetorical genre studies and applications to teaching writing based on a rhetorical genre approach.
Keywords: writing research, genre, Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), cognitive, social, professional genres, academic genres, teaching writing
1Introduction
Within the field of Rhetoric and Composition, a rich body of research has accumulated that explores the history of writing, the cognitive and social dimensions of written communication, and the function of writing within academic, professional, and public communities. An aggregate of this research can be found in Charles Bazerman’s Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text (2008) or Peter Smagorinsky’s Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change (2006). In addition, recent volumes based on the international Writing Research across Borders (WRAB) conference feature a variety of empirically grounded and conceptually focused work from different research traditions and different regions (Bazerman et al. 2010, 2012). Within the context of this diverse body of writing research has emerged a research tradition exploring the role of genre in written communication, which will be the focus of this chapter. While researchers in Systemic Functional Linguistics or SFL (Cope and Kalantzis 1993; Macken-Horarik 2002; Martin 1997; Martin and Rose 2008) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) (Cheng 2007; Johns 2002; Swales 1990; Tardy 2009) have made significant contributions to theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on genre, this chapter will focus on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), which refers to the body of genre theory, research, and scholarship that has developed primarily in North America over the past three decades. This rhetorical perspective on genre has its origins in Carolyn Miller’s (1984)groundbreaking redefinition of genre as a typified response to a recurring rhetorical situation and reconceptualization of genres as social actions. The recognition of how formal features are connected to social purposes and the ensuing investigations of texts in their social contexts have informed the study and teaching of writing. Over the past 30 years, genre research has contributed substantially to our understanding of: 1. how learners acquire academic and workplace genres; 2. how writers negotiate generic differences in order to perform across multiple contexts; and 3. how genres carry out social purposes and coordinate social actions. This chapter will explore the state of the art of research on writing skills from a rhetorical genre perspective, with a focus on both cognitive and social perspectives and with an emphasis on the exploration of writing in both educational and professional contexts.
Before proceeding, it is worth noting that, despite the organization of the following sections into cognitive and social approaches, genre has been defined as a socio-cognitive phenomenon that encompasses both knowledge of rhetorical and formal conventions of genres and knowledge of how to strategically use an understanding of genre to participate in communities – what Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas Huckin have defined as a form of “situated cognition” (1993: 485). As Charles Bazerman explains, genres both “shape the thoughts we form” and shape “the communications by which we interact” (1997: 19). From the scholarship on RGS has emerged a view of genres as both cognitive tools that writers draw on to recognize, encounter, and make sense of situations and as social or cultural artifacts that coordinate social actions and carry out social purposes. Such a complex and multi-dimensional understanding of genre has challenged RGS scholars to consider how to teach genre in ways that recognize this complexity. The following sections focus on research that examines the development of genre learning in academic and professional contexts, the relationship between genre knowledge and performance, and the ways in which genre knowledge is socially situated and culturally mediated, along with the implications of this research for teaching writing.
2Cognitive research on academic genres and writing
In “Genre and Cognitive Development: Beyond Writing to Learn,” Bazerman emphasizes the function of genres as cognitive tools, stating that “genres identify a problem space for the developing writer to work in as well as provide the form of the solution the writer seeks and particular tools useful in the solution” (2009: 291). Drawing on Vygotskian theories and perspectives on the “Writing to Learn” movement, Bazerman notes that genres may function as resources for learning and tools for gaining access to writing situations. Miller further acknowledges the role of genre in learning when she states that “what we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have” (1984: 165). The following sections focus on research studies of how genre learning develops, how genres may function as resources for learning, and how this learning may be applied and used in new writing contexts.
2.1Development of genre knowledge in academic contexts
Many studies have examined the way in which genre learning is connected to cognitive development. Research on the role of genre in children’s literacy development has focused primarily on the genre of narrative, the development of narrative writing skills, and the relationship between narrative and non-narrative genre development (Donovan and Smolkin 2008). Aviva Freedman’s early research (1987) on narrative structure and the development of storytelling focused on the writing of students at three grade levels – 5th grade (10–11 year olds), 8th grade (13–14 year olds) and 12th grade (17–18 year olds) – and in two different modes: “true” stories (based on personal experience) and invented stories. She found that there was “an increasing realization with age of the ideal form of story structure” but that the task of incorporating story structure for “true” stories was more cognitively challenging than for invented stories. She concludes, “Writing is a complex act, not simply because it involves the orchestration of many processes and subprocesses, but also because it engages the individual at various levels – cognitive, affective, moral” (166).
Sally Mitchell and Richard Andrews (1994) have also explored genre learning as a developmental process, charting the transition of students from writing historical narratives to more complex cognitive and rhetorical tasks of writing historical analyses and arguments. Within the context of the Cambridge History Project, a British secondary education project that emphasizes both historical knowledge and disciplinary skills, they examined history essays that grew increasingly complex with each assignment, following Bloom’s (1956) cognitive levels of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. With an interest in how students’ learning or acquisition of a genre equates to performance, they found that genre knowledge – knowledge about the typified conventions of an argument – does not necessarily translate to genre performance – being able to think analytically and to produce argumentative genres.
Further studies of learning within a genre-based framework of writing instruction have clarified this distinction between genre knowledge and awareness of how to effectively deploy genre strategies in particular rhetorical and social situations. In his case studies of four international graduate students in engineering and other fields, An Cheng (2007) studied how writers used their analysis of research articles to replicate generic features (of introductions and literature reviews) as they wrote three different versions of a research article introduction for varying rhetorical contexts. Based on his results, he distinguishes between “knowing genres” – acquisition of genre types and features – and “understanding genres” (or genre awareness) – “an awareness of how rhetorical considerations lead to the appropriate use of the multitude of genres and their respective generic features” (Cheng 2007: 304). Research that explores this relationship between genre knowledge and performance is discussed in the following section.
2.2Genre knowledge and performance
Building on studies that examine the development of genre knowledge and genre learning, several studies have examined how genres function as tools or resources for gaining access to and performing in new writing situations. Bazerman notes, “Genre is a tool for getting at the resources the students bring with them, the genres they carry from their educations and their experiences in society, and it is a tool for framing challenges that bring students into new domains that are as yet for them unexplored, but not so different from what they know as to be unintelligible” (1997: 24). The accumulation of research on genre knowledge and performance confirms this complex relationship while also demonstrating that genre knowledge does not necessarily always translate to successful performance. In their recent study of the role of previous genre knowledge in the performance of incoming engineering students, Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox (2010) focused on incoming students’ abilities to identify genres and to produce the genre of the technical report, which only a small percentage of students had previously written. Students in an engineering communication course were given a diagnostic assessment that asked them to read five passages on the same topic (the Challenger Shuttle disaster) and identify the genre; they were then asked to write a short technical report on the topic. The findings revealed that, even though the majority of students (77 %) confidently identified the rhetorical and textual features of a technical report, this expertise did not translate to their ability to write a technical report: “Overall, students’ awareness of genre differences and their ability to identify and report genre features did not enable them to produce a text in the requested genre” (2010: 21–22).
Other research has shown that students’ prior genre knowledge is so ingrained that they are unable to adapt this knowledge to new genres and situations. In their study on “Teaching and Learning a Multimodal Genre in a Psychology Course,” Chris Anson, Deanna Dannels, and Karen St. Clair (2005) discovered that the tacit, prior genre knowledge that students bring to a new assignment may make it difficult to get outside the framework of traditional, single mode genres, thus negatively affecting performance of new multimodal genres. This finding is supported by a cross-institutional study carried out by Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi (2011), who found that some students acted as “boundary-guarders,” holding tightly to their prior knowledge of genre, and were unwilling to adapt that knowledge to new writing situations. On the other hand, “boundary-crossers” were students who were more likely to repurpose their genre knowledge and adapt it to new writing situations.
This interest in how prior genre knowledge can cue students’ writing performances in new situations and can both limit and enable effective learning transfer has been pursued in a recent study by Rebecca Nowacek (2011) – a classroom-based ethnography focused on an interdisciplinary writing community (linked courses in history, literature, and religious studies). Nowacek found that spoken and written genres “offer exigencies and constraints for students trying to make connections and teachers trying to facilitate connections” (2011: 18). Genre knowledge can motivate connections, as in the case of a student who successfully drew on his previous knowledge (of research papers and analysis essays) to create a hybrid genre that synthesized the rhetorical goals of research and analysis to effectively respond to an assignment. On the other hand, genre knowledge can limit effective learning transfer, as in the case of a student who drew on her knowledge of personal diaries to respond to a history assignment that conceptualized the diary as more of a detailed log; in this case the student’s genre knowledge cued acts of transfer that were counterproductive to the objectives of the assignment.
Coinciding with an interest in how genre functions as a resource “that helps individuals both to generate … and to interpret” meaning (2011: 19), Nowacek is interested in students’ roles as rhetorical actors and their identities as “agents of integration” who not only adapt previous knowledge to new situations but also reshape, reuse, and repurpose writing knowledge. In her study of writing assignments across the disciplines, Mary Soliday (2011) examined how students enact the role of “agents of integration” as they struggle to adapt their stance within academic genres and to achieve authority, a struggle that lies at the core of the successful acquisition of writing skills. This focus on the identity and agency of the student learner is further explored in studies such as Christine Tardy’s longitudinal research study of the development of genre knowledge of four multilingual graduate students in engineering and computer sciences (Building Genre Knowledge 2009). When Chatri, a native of Thailand and a second-year doctoral student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was asked to participate in the genres of the profession and to review a manuscript, he took on a new position of agency and “position of power within the genre system” (2009: 257), transforming his sense of identity within the research community. In addition, Yoshi, a Japanese student, struggled with adopting a confident and assertive tone in a cover letter, noting that this U.S. style discourse would be considered arrogant and rhetorically ineffective in his country. All four international students described tensions they felt between their cultural identities and discursive identities. However, as Tardy notes, the writer’s negotiation of these tensions is “central to understanding individual writing development” (2009: 276). In her study of the genre learning of multilingual writers, Tardy observes, “Writers have unique cultural profiles and perspectives, linguistic backgrounds, educational experiences, geopolitical contexts, and so on, all relevant to genre learning” (2009: 275). The next section will focus on research that explores genre learning as socially situated and culturally mediated.
3Socio-cultural approaches to academic genres and writing
Some studies have found that socio-economic class level can play a significant role in the development of genre knowledge. Based on her investigation of the influence of sociocultural background on the genre acquisition of British school children and examination of a large corpus of essays written in response to national tests and representing varied age levels and sociocultural groups, Debra Myhill (2005) found that young writers draw on their prior knowledge of the narrative genre, based on broad cultural experiences of narrative. However, they struggled more with genres for which they had no prior sociocultural knowledge. In addition, Myhill found that middle-class children are better positioned for acculturation to academic genres. This finding is supported by the research done by Alina Spinello and Chris Pratt (2005), who studied two groups of Brazilian elementary school children – one group of middle-class and one group of working class students – and found that middle-class children were able to identify and produce genres (particularly stories and letters) more successfully than working class students. Middle class students were aware of the linguistic conventions and formal structures of stories and letters and displayed more of a “meta-textual awareness” or genre knowledge.
Further exploring the ways in which genre performances are culturally mediated, Rochelle Kapp and Bongi Bangeni (2005) conducted a case study of black, working class, first-generation college students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Through their immersion in reading and writing genres of social sciences and learning of formal features alongside the form of the academic conversation, students did gain knowledge of genre conventions; however, this knowledge did not translate to performance. They concluded, “Through an exploration of its strengths and weaknesses, we argue that while a genre approach is a key resource for providing metaknowledge of the discourse conventions, it does not provide the necessary exploratory talking and writing space to enable students from outside the dominant discourses to become critical participants” (2005: 111).
However, other studies have found that genres, as “flexible forms of language functioning in socially situated practices” (Cristovao 2009: 13) can be culturally empowering, particularly for lower-level students. Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão studied 4th and 5th graders in Brazil who received genre instruction as they wrote in multiple genres – memories, opinions, and poems. She analyzed 230 memory texts (on the topic “The Place Where I Live”) and observed how the students’ genres based on memories were “anchored in situated socio-historical settings” (2009: 23) and enabled them to critically reflect on where they lived. She also observed students as they were led through a “didactic sequence” that first defines the features of the genre, then provides examples of genres, then asks students to read, analyze and finally produce the genre. She found that this approach to genre, based in critical analysis and production, can empower students, “providing contact with their cultural anchorage and respect to their socio-cultural settings” (2009: 23). Overall, while recent studies of genre in academic settings have made cultural background a significant variable, further research is needed on the dynamic cultural and sociohistorical conditions that shape students’ genre knowledge and performance.
4Cognitive research on professional genres and writing
Coinciding with the body of empirical research on genre in academic contexts are multiple research studies that investigate professional and workplace genres. Similar to the interest in how novice writers gain access to academic discourse and learn new genres, a rich body of research has examined how novices learn new genres in the workplace and use those genres to carry out the social goals of the organization. This section will focus on how genre knowledge develops in the workplace, how this communal knowledge is used to carry out common goals and actions, and how these genres function ideologically, both constraining and enabling the social actions of participants in professional organizations.
4.1The development of genre knowledge in the workplace
In her chapter from Writing in the Real World, “Learning New Genres: The Convergence of Knowledge and Action” (1999), Anne Beaufort carried out an ethnographic study of three writers at a Job Resource Center, a non-profit organization, analyzing the genre of the press release, letter of request, and grant proposal. All three workers illustrated that, even though they were immersed in the discourse community, they still had to learn conventions of the genres and truly understand the goals of the community (and also practice and receive help from superiors) before mastering their workplace’s new genres. Beaufort found that the optimal conditions for genre learning and acquisition involve both immersion in the context and coaching. She also found that content and procedural knowledge worked together, that depth of genre knowledge grew over time, and that genre knowledge was based on participation in the community. These findings are supported by a more recent study of how novices are initiated into NIH grant writing via both cognitive and social apprenticeships (Ding 2008). Learning the genre of grant writing relies on both cognitive apprenticeship approaches – such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration – as well as social apprenticeship approaches, such as socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences.
The role of genres in reflecting and reinforcing communal knowledge and generating new knowledge has led to a number of research studies focused on how genre knowledge within academic contexts transfers to workplace settings, with several studies focused on novice writers’ “cognitive apprenticeship” and initiation into the professional organization via professional internships. In their study of the transition from academic to professional writing, “Write Where You Are: Situating Learning to Write in the University and Workplace Settings,” Aviva Freedman and Christine Adam (2000) studied the “situated learning” of genres. They observed seven master’s level students involved in full-time internships organized by a Canadian University’s school of public administration, in which the students spent a semester working in paid, full-time public sector jobs. They compared these to a second set of subjects – 3 students in an upper-level undergraduate course in financial analysis. Through visits to the respective classroom and workplace sites, observations, interviews, and collection of texts, they found that the goals of genre learning differed significantly and that “the guide-learner relations are different” (2000: 55). Whereas learning was the goal of academic writing, action and policy setting were the goals of workplace writing; in addition, in the workplace, roles were less static and fixed. Freedman and Adam concluded, “When students leave the university to enter the workplace, they not only need to learn new genres of discourse, they need to learn new ways to learn such genres” (2000: 56).
These new ways of learning genres for novices entering the workplace are explored by Natasha Artemeva in her study, “A Time to Speak, a Time to Act: A Rhetorical Genre Analysis of a Novice Engineer’s Calculated Risk Taking.” Artemeva reported on a case study of a novice engineer, Sami, and examined the features of rhetorical genre knowledge that allow a novice to be successful in challenging and changing rhetorical practices of the workplace (2006: 192). Artemeva found that, by drawing on his previous personal experiences (a family of engineers), educational experiences (in particular, an engineering communication course he had taken), along with his workplace experiences, Sami was able to draw on his previous genre knowledge of engineering in order to successfully participate in the communicative actions of an engineering firm (2006: 217).
In further research on novices/interns and the development of genre knowledge in professional settings, Graham Smart and Nicole Brown (2002) studied 25 seniors in a Professional Writing major, who were placed in a variety of settings – from high-tech companies to PR firms to non-profit organizations – and examined their ability to navigate unfamiliar genres such as training manuals, newsletters, grant proposals, advertisements, and employee handbooks. They found that the interns’ successful efforts in producing unfamiliar genres were due to their immersion in the organizational culture, their interactions with fellow employees and developing sense of professional identity, and their encounters with “mediating artifacts,” such as other discourse genres and linguistic artifacts (documents, print, and electronic texts). Smart and Brown (2002: 122) noted that the key contribution of their study is its challenge to the cognitivist concept of learning transfer and its support for an understanding of “transformation” of learning – most notably that genre performance and learning may happen simultaneously, as writers reinvent writing practices in new contexts.
5Research on social factors affecting workplace genres and writing
The above studies of how genre knowledge develops within professional organizations focus on the importance of participation in and immersion in workplace communities and enculturation in the new professional domain. This section will focus on how genres define social roles and purposes. Catherine Schryer notes, “Although some composition researchers have brought genre theory into university classrooms, it has been empirical researchers in professional communication who have most profited from and most developed [Carolyn] Miller’s linking of genres to social contexts” (2002: 77).
5.1Research Studies of Genre Systems in the Workplace
Various studies have focused on a “genre system” or “set of genres interacting to accomplish the work” of an organization (Devitt 1991: 340). These researchers have examined the role of genre systems in the workplace and are interested in how groups of connected genres or a range of interrelated genres comprise the complex communicative interactions of organizations, from insurance companies, to banks, to social work agencies, to engineering firms. Carol Berkenkotter, in her study, “Genre Systems at Work” (2001), examined the various genres produced in a rural mental health clinic and the ways in which the mental health reports – which circulated from writers to supervisor, to psychiatrist, to case manager, to other therapists who might work with the client in the future – coordinated the complex activity in this setting and across professional and institutional settings. One genre set focused on is the psychotherapy interview and the notes taken during the interview with the client. These therapist notes participated in a system of genres consisting of an oral session, written evaluation, initial assessment, treatment plan, progress reports, and termination summary – a genre system that coordinated the various kinds of professional activity within the mental health clinic, maintained an institutional record, and enabled information to travel to other institutional systems (legal, medical, actuarial).
Similarly, Dorothy Winsor, in her case study of entry-level engineers, studied the genre of documentation and noted that “documentation does more than record events; it also defines them, and in doing so, it shapes the organization’s understanding of both events and of itself” (1999: 220). Winsor reported on four case studies from a nine-year study of entry-level engineers writing at work and found that the genre of documentation coordinated work and provided ways to deal with conflict and maintain consensus. One engineer, Al, became a labor relations representative for his facility, thus acting as a “mediator” between the union and management. Whether interviewing workers accused of violating work rules, responding to a filed grievance, or taking minutes during contract negotiations, Al used documentation genres to define, record, and maintain the activities of the organization and to construct social relations. Winsor concluded by noting that genre is “one of the resources that may be deployed to create relations of power and hierarchy” (1999: 222), which is the focus of the next section.
5.2Research on the ideological effects of writing professional genres
Following genre studies like those above that have explored how groups of connected genres – or systems – have coordinated social actions and shaped professional identities, recent genre studies have also examined how genres reflect and reinforce ideologies. In her study entitled “Ordering Work: Blue-collar Literacy and the Political Nature of Genre,” Winsor (2000) explored the political nature of genre, She observed the work of three engineers and three technicians at AgriCorp, a large manufacturer of agricultural equipment and analyzed the genre of the work order, which are generic textual tools used by engineers to set the tasks for technicians. Winsor found that work orders maintained the corporate hierarchy and reinforced engineers’ vision of technicians as little more than tools that they activated through the work order, instead of as agents and participants in the social action. She concluded that “power relations and perceptions of work lead to and from perceptions of genre” but that, as a field, “we have not always paid sufficient attention to the fact … that genre is also a form of political action” (Winsor 2000: 180).
Also exploring the relationship between genre and power, Catherine Schryer (1994) designed an ethnographic study of records within a veterinary medical context and found that the new system of record keeping mirrored the way that practitioners solved complicated medical problems and coordinated social action as other staff members later added to the records. In addition, by comparing competing genres – comparing the new system of records to the former system – Schryer was able to discern varying social purposes and values implicit in these two genres, divergences that revealed tensions between researchers and practitioners in the college. She discovered that professional genres “deeply enact their ideology” (Schryer 1994: 122) by expressing clear power relations.
The ways in which genres reflect and perpetuate a hierarchical order can also be seen in Schryer’s case study (2002) of negative “bad news” letters within an insurance company. She found that letter writers, despite their personal discomfort with assuming a position of power, felt constrained by the genre to compose letters whose structure and linguistic strategies (nontransactive constructions, nominalizations, passive constructions, negations) reduced readers to passivity and nonresponse. In a more recent study of a different kind of letters, Schryer et al. (2009) examined how forensic letters in child abuse cases negotiated the difference between diagnosis and opinion, finding that the letters are “reifications” that constitute part of the essential documentation in child abuse cases: “In a real sense, they launch the terms of the arguments that influence if a child is taken into protective care, if caregivers are charged with a criminal offense, or if other social agencies just keep a watchful eye on a particular family” (2009: 241).
The influential role of genre in shaping interpretation and limiting and enabling social action can also be seen in Berkenkotter and Ravotas’ (1997) study of a genre of classification – the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) – and how it shapes interpretation and diagnosis. The DSM-IV shapes interpretation by classifying patients into categories based on population and activity (i.e. “borderline personalities” or “survivors of sexual abuse”). The client’s narrative and local knowledge are factored out as the condition is taken up and resituated into a universal classification system based on the field-specific knowledge of medical psychiatry. A more recent study further explored this tension between a medical genre’s generalizable principles and its application to individual medical cases. Christa Teston (2009) carried out a grounded investigation of a medical genre – the Standard of Care document. The Standard of Care document is a set of national guidelines that medical experts consult in order to determine the kind of care considered standard when treating patients with cancer. After examining this genre’s role and function within the cross-disciplinary collaborations of the Tumor Board meetings – meetings that bring together oncologists, surgeons, pathologists, radiologists and primary care physicians to discuss cancer cases – Teston found that the Standard of Care principles were not always generalizable to individual cases and that the genre embodied “the tension between the expectations of the profession and the experiences of their patients” (347). She also found that this authoritative genre had “implications for how decisions get made and patient prognoses are constructed” (347), assigning it a powerful role in the medical community.
This understanding of the ideological function of genres within organizations and their ability to create and maintain subject positions has led to significant research over the past two decades that has examined how writers make strategic choices to resist or challenge genre conventions based on their cultural positioning. In his study of social work genres, Paré (2002) examined the ways in which Inuit social workers resisted adapting to the professional identity of record keeping due to their reluctance to provide detailed records for white authorities. A recent study more fully illustrates how individuals work within constraints and resist conventions in order to produce change. Amy Propen and Mary Lay Schuster (2010) focused on how individuals within the legal system (victims and advocates) were able to create a genre, victim impact statements (VIS), that work to disrupt and destabilize legal decision-making. Although it operates within the norms and conventions of the courtroom and is presented to the judge during his or her presentencing investigation, the VIS is not bound to the conventions of logical, factual arguments that typically comprise legal genres and can be personal, emotional, and highly individualized. Results indicated that VISs have an impact on the terms and conditions of the sentencing (for example, after reading a VIS that described a mother’s death as a hardship on the surviving children, a judge added the stipulation that the defendant pay for counseling as part of his sentence), illustrating that “genre change can happen at the level of an individual genre instantiation in an individual context, while functioning within a larger collective or community” (2010: 10). The genre of the VIS functions as a tool that allows victims’ voices to be heard while also allowing victims and advocates to push for systemic change.
6Methodology
In “Investigating Texts in Their Social Contexts: The Promise and Peril of Rhetorical Genre Studies,” Catherine Schryer (2011) suggests “that Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have been making and have the capacity to make a significant contribution to writing research precisely because RGS researchers work at the interstices of various disciplines,” from rhetorical genre theory, to applied linguistics, to social and sociological perspectives, to theories of learning. Indeed, genre research, as reflected in the studies described previously in this chapter, forms a rich site for interdisciplinarity, with researchers drawing on cognitive and sociological approaches and multiple methods, such as discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, and case study research. As Bazerman (1997) has argued, genre-based research that draws on multiple methods “holds much promise for drawing humanities’ understandings of the workings of language into relation with the social sciences’ understandings of human relations, behavior, and consciousness” (23). In this way, rhetorical genre studies can benefit not only from research studies of how genres are learned, performed, and situated, but genre analysis itself can be used as a research methodology and “can play a major role in the current investigations into the communicative grounds of social order” (23).
While genre research in RGS over the past three decades has drawn on pluralistic methodologies and has integrated multiple methods and data sources in the study of genre, we have not yet fully accounted for the range of complex factors – individual, sociohistorical, cultural, material – that inform genre knowledge and performance in academic and professional settings. Noting that “research on the learners’ side of genre-based instruction is still not prevalent” (2011: 70), Cheng calls for further genre-focused writing research and practice that explores “the unique contribution of textual explorations to building students’ awareness of the rhetorical contexts of a genre” (2011: 81). We need further empirical investigations – studies that draw on multiple methods, cross-institutional research, ethnography, etc. – to track the complex, dynamic cognitive, textual, rhetorical, and social activities involved in the situated learning of genre, further studies that can enrich our understanding of genre and its role in the writing classroom. Applications of genre research to the teaching of writing are explored in the following section.
7Applications: genre approaches to teaching writing skills
Given the complexity of writing, genre researchers, as discussed in section 2 of this chapter, have studied the question of how students acquire or learn genres. For example, Aviva Freedman’s early research (1987) on how novice writers learn to write by immersion in the discipline or professional context of which the genre is a part leads to her claim that students have a natural ability to acquire writing skills tacitly. In her ethnographic study of students in an undergraduate class in law, Freedman found that, even without explicit instruction, students internalized practices of the discipline of legal studies. According to Freedman’s study, learners acquired a new genre by approaching the task with a “dimly felt sense” of the new genre they were attempting, a generalized sense of academic discourse that is modified based on inferences writers made from writing assignments, feedback on assignments, class discussions, lectures, and readings. Thus, according to Freedman, students acquire a new genre “in the course of writing – in the performance itself” and in “learning to write by writing” (1987: 107), making explicit methods of instruction unnecessary.
Freedman’s above study, along with her later critique of explicit approaches to teaching genre in a special issue of Research in the Teaching of English (1993a, 1993b), began a lively debate among scholars from various theoretical and pedagogical traditions. Her immersion model of acquisition stands in contrast to more text-based or linguistic models that focus on explicit teaching of genres, such as those advocated by specialists in Systemic Functional Linguistics or the SFL-based Sydney School of genre studies (Cope and Kalantzis 1993; Macken-Horarik 2002;Martin 1997; Martin and Rose 2008). For instance, based on empowering those students with less access to the privileged forms of academic discourse, the Sydney School asserts the need to demystify textual and linguistic features of powerful genres, while RGS scholars are concerned with abstracting genres from their social contexts and teaching them too prescriptively. However, this debate over the role of genre in writing instruction has been mediated by those, such as John Swales, who have suggested an assimilation of views and a “more nuanced approach to genre-awareness raising and genre acquisition” (2009: 5) that combines explicit and implicit approaches.
Indeed, various studies have demonstrated the importance of both methods that facilitate tacit learning – through immersion in writing situations – and methods based on explicit instruction. In her study (based on surveys, interviews with students, observations, and audiotaped classes), Mary Soliday researched the teaching of a science course and found that the instructor “mapped out genre both implicitly and explicitly” (2005: 68), both immersing students in discussions and lectures and also explicitly articulating genre expectations in writing assignments and model texts. Similarly, Lorelei Lingard and Richard Haber, based on their observation of medical student apprenticeships, explored the tension between tacit learning and explicit teaching, concluding that “there is a role for rhetorically explicit instruction in the context of situated practice” (2002: 168). They further note that explicit teaching, when “situated and accurate,” can cultivate in students a “meta-awareness” or conscious, critical awareness of genre (and its rhetorical purposes and contextual meanings) that increases effectiveness of communication.
Further bridging explicit and tacit learning approaches, Devitt calls for the “explicit teaching of genre awareness,” an approach that would teach “a meta-awareness of genres as learning strategies, rather than static features” (2004: 197). This is supported by Beaufort’s longitudinal study (2007) of one writer’s transfer of skills across contexts of high school, college, and career and the identification of genre knowledge as one of the domains or mental schema that writers invoke as they analyze new writing tasks in new contexts – a domain that can bridge rhetorical and social knowledge. Positive transfer of learning, according to Beaufort, is facilitated by teaching genres as learning strategies that can provide students with tools that transfer to multiple contexts. With this in mind, she recommends metacognitive activities that teach genre awareness, such as asking students to compare the rhetorical strategies of texts on the same topic but in two different genres or having students collect multiple examples of a genre, followed by analyzing the genre, producing the genre, and writing a “how to” guide for writing in that genre. By having students analyze the relationship between genre and situation, reflect on how genres work within communities and on their ideological effects, and draw on and repurpose prior genre knowledge to produce genres, a genre-based pedagogy can help students understand and write in various situations and contexts. Most genre approaches in the classroom, then, focus on a two-fold approach to 1. teaching genre analysis as a way of gaining access to unfamiliar writing situations and2. teaching critical genre awareness, which encourages students to transfer genre knowledge to new contexts for writing. Examples of these approaches will be described further below.
7.1Teaching Genre Analysis
In the RGS approach to teaching genre analysis, students learn how to use genre analysis to gain access to new or unfamiliar writing situations. This genre-based pedagogy, more fully articulated in the textbook Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004), leads students through the following steps: 1. collecting samples of the genre and observing the scene or context in which the genre functions; 2. identifying the setting, subject, participants and purposes of the genre; 3. describing the genre’s features; and 4. analyzing what the features reveal about the situation in which the genre is used. To prompt this analysis, students consider questions such as, “What do these rhetorical patterns reveal about the genre, its situation, and the scene in which it is used? Why are these patterns significant? What can you learn about the actions being performed through the genre by observing its language patterns?” (Devitt, Reiff and Bawarshi: 94). Students learn how to connect rhetorical features to social practices and gain a socio-rhetorical awareness and agility that will enable them more critically and effectively to map, negotiate, and participate in various situations within and beyond the academy.
Other approaches to teaching genre analysis include Cathy Fleischer’s and Sarah Andrew-Vaughan’s “unfamiliar genre project” assignment. In Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Helping Students Navigate Unfamiliar Genres, they describe a genre-based curricular approach that asks students to explore an unfamiliar genre by following these steps: 1. reading and collecting samples of the genre and keeping a research journal; 2. writing a how-to guide on writing the genre; 3. creating an annotated bibliography of model samples of the genre; 4. producing the genre; 5. writing a reflective letter on the experience; and 6. sharing the work with a parent or guardian or other interested person who will respond to the work. Students chose genres such as political pamphlets, sports columns, movie reviews, and parodies, and according to Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan, “researching their genre helps students gain confidence that they can take on new writing tasks” (2009: 116) and helps them experience “what it means to write something that is outside their comfort zones” (2009: 160).
While genre analysis continues to be a feature of many writing textbooks focused on academic discourse (argument and analysis), recent texts have featured analysis of public and new media genres. Brock Dethier’s 21 Genres and How to Write Them (2013) features a series of rhetorical or process-based “moves” for writing particular genres, from Wikis, to blogs, to emails. Followed by an analysis of the genre’s purpose, audience, and context, Dethier includes a series of questions that ask writers to consider the typical content of the text, its length, how it arranged, what words stand out, the tone – to unpack the rhetorical moves choreographed by the genre. Similarly, Kathryn Evans’ Real Questions: Reading and Writing Genres (2013) features, in addition to academic genres, genres such as opinion editorials, blog posts, brochures, and public service ads. Each chapter focuses on analysis of the genre’s purpose, audience, organization, focus, development, language, and design. While these approaches enable students to gain knowledge of genres (and access to the situations within which they participate), it is also crucial that students are able to make critically informed decisions within these writing situations. This critical awareness of genre is the focus of the next section.
7.2Teaching Critical Awareness of Genre
In “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness,” Devitt shares an approach that combines explicit teaching of particular genres, the teaching of antecedent genres, and the teaching of critical genre awareness, with the goal of cultivating transfer of writing knowledge to other situations. With the end goal being “a critical consciousness of genre,” Devitt leads students through the following sequence of assignments: 1. analyzing a familiar genre; 2. writing the familiar genre differently; 3. analyzing a genre from another culture or time; 4. analyzing an academic genre; 5. writing that academic genre; 6. critiquing the genre and recommending changes; and 7. rewriting the genre (2009: 349). This sequence encourages students to mediate between familiar and unfamiliar genres – and between analysis and production of genres – in order to cultivate an awareness of how contexts shape generic responses.
Beaufort also recommends a series of scaffolded assignments and related exercises that work to cultivate metacognition and meta-awareness of genre. These assignments ask students to analyze the relationship between genre and situation, to explore how genres work within communities, to reflect on their ideological effects, and to draw on and repurpose prior genre knowledge to produce genres – with the purpose of helping students how to understand and write in various situations and contexts. In unit 1, students write a literacy autobiography and study the genre features of the autobiographical essay. In unit 2, students carry out a genre analysis, whereby “having students look at texts in terms of genres and how they are written allows them to build more transferable skills to carry into other writing environments” (2007: 194). Finally, in unit 3, students conduct an ethnography of a discourse community, which includes collecting textual artifacts and analyzing genres of the community. Reflecting on her proposed curriculum, Beaufort states, “Generally I begin with the concept of genres, and then, after students have read, discussed, written in several genres and we have talked about the nature of each, I bridge to the discourse communities students know and participate in” (2007:178). These meta-discussions and assignments are interwoven with various activities for teaching genre awareness: having students list and describe 10 genres they regularly read and write, having students compare the treatment of the same subject in two different genres, or having students collect samples of everyday genres such as obituaries, postcards, or wedding announcements and analyze the values and social actions reflected in their features.
The pedagogical applications above emphasize multiple approaches, both implicit and explicit, to immersing students in reading and writing genres, providing opportunities for metacognitive reflection as well as opportunities for feedback. They also draw on explicit teaching as students read model genres, analyze generic features and move from description of these features to production of the genre. While all of these approaches are distinctive, they promote multiple, overlapping methods that develop cognitive abilities related to genre awareness, that teach acquisition of linguistic or text-based strategies, and that demonstrate how cognitive and textual knowledge of genres are shaped by the sociocultural context.
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