G

Genre and Second Language Writing

KEN HYLAND

­Framing the Issue

Genre, understood most simply, is a term for grouping texts together, representing
how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations. Its impor-
tance in second language writing instruction is that it allows teachers to under-
stand, and make explicit to students, the ways that texts can be written to achieve
particular purposes. In the classroom it is an approach to writing teaching which
goes beyond helping learners to generate content, work through drafts or practice
grammatical forms so that they can see texts as attempts to communicate with
readers. It therefore counteracts any tendency to treat individual texts in isolation
from others or grammar separately from use. In other words, genre helps teachers
to theorize the common-sense labels we use to categorize texts and to unpack the
ways they are structured and used; it provides a way of identifying the kinds of
texts that students write in their target contexts and to organize courses to meet
these needs.
Essentially, genre is based on the idea that members of a community usually
have little difficulty in recognizing similarities in the texts they use frequently and
are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such texts to read, understand
and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is because writing is based on expec-
tations: the process of writing involves creating a text that the writer assumes the
reader will recognize and expect, and the process of reading involves working out
what the writer is trying to do. In other words, we assemble sense from a text by

The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, First Edition. Edited by John I. Liontas
(Project Editor: Margo DelliCarpini; Volume Editors: Neil J Anderson,
Diane D. Belcher, and Alan Hirvela).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2359 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM

 2360 Genre and Second Language Writing

making connections to prior texts to anticipate the other’s actions. This is like
dancers following each other’s steps, as participants coordinate to accomplish a
smooth understanding. While writing, like dancing, allows for creativity and the
unexpected, established patterns often form the basis of variations. We know
immediately, for example, whether a text is a recipe, a lesson plan or a love letter
and can respond to it immediately because of our experience with other texts
like it.
More precisely, we possess a schema of prior knowledge which we share with
others and can draw on to express ourselves efficiently and effectively. We all have
a repertoire of these schemas and develop new ones as we need them, so teachers
develop control over specialized genres such as lesson plans, student reports, and
teacher feedback comments, bringing some expertise to the ways they understand
and write these texts.
Thus genre reminds us that when we write we follow conventions for organiz-
ing messages so that our reader can recognize our purpose and follow our ideas.
Because we cannot express our entire purpose in one step, genres are made up of
a number of rhetorical moves or stages and there are often constraints on the
sequence in which they can occur and the forms which comprise them. So, for
example, narratives often follow a problem solution pattern like this:

Situation: I am a teacher of ESL writing (What is the situation?)

Problem: My students couldn’t express
themselves in writing (What problem arose?)
Response: I adopted a genre-based approach (What did you do?)
Evaluation of response: Now they can all
write beautifully (Did it fix the problem?)

Writers often use past-tense verbs, adjectives describing people and places,
action verbs to bring the story alive and connectives, linking words to do with
time. By frequently writing or reading this genre we develop a schema which
allows us to recognize an effective narrative. If one part is missing we have t­ rouble
understanding it and, as teachers, we can recognize this absence and help s­ tudents
to address it.

­Making the Case

Genre refers to the complex oral or written responses we make to the demands of
a social context, and analysts set out to describe these responses. Like any produc-
tive concept, however, genre is not one, but several approaches, each one informed
by a different view of what writing is and how it can best be taught. These
approaches spread along a continuum between an emphasis on context or text:
either informed by social theories of context and community or grounded in
­language and text structure.

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2360 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM

 Genre and Second Language Writing 2361

Theorists at the contextual end of the line are largely influenced by poststruc-
turalism, rhetoric, and first language composition, so that genre is not the text
itself, but a concept stored in the schemas of expert writers who apply and vary it
as they read or write for specific contexts. The focus is mainly on the rhetorical
contexts in which genres are employed, and analysts seek to unpack the relations
between text and context to show how each shapes the other. Bakhtin’s notion of
“dialogism” is influential together with his view that while genres involve regu-
larities and conventions, they are nevertheless “flexible, plastic, and free”
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 79). This emphasis on the dynamic quality of genres leads to a
view that genres are too complex and varied to be removed from their original
situations and taught in classrooms (e.g., Freedman, 1994). Experts acquire genres
through experience in authentic situations and use them without explicit
­knowledge of their structure. This perspective shows that there are a wide variety
of practices relevant to p ­ articular times, places, participants, and purposes and
that these practices are integral to our individual identities, social relationships,
and group memberships.
At the other end of the continuum, the approach to genre influenced by Systemic
Functional Linguistics (SFL) focuses on the sequential character of different genres
and the ways that language is systematically linked to context through patterns
of lexico-grammatical features (Martin, 2012). The fact that SFL conceptions of
genre have emerged within a linguistic framework means that researchers tend to
characterize genres in terms of broad rhetorical patterns such as narratives,
recounts, arguments, and expositions. These are referred to as elemental genres and
are defined by internal linguistic criteria, rather than the regularly occurring
activities which we usually think of as genres, such as job applications, film reviews,
and recipes. These elemental genres combine to form more complex everyday
macro genres. Thus, an elemental genre such as a procedure can be found in macro
genres such as lab reports, instruction manuals, and tax returns, while a macro genre
like a newspaper editorial might be composed of several elemental genres such as
an exposition, a discussion, and a rebuttal. This approach is strongly driven by edu-
cational goals and the need to provide both first and second language learners
with access to socially valued genres through an explicit grammar of linguistic
choices.
Between these two extremes, and focusing more explicitly on the genres used by
specific academic and professional communities, are approaches associated with
English for Specific Purposes (e.g., Swales, 1990). Genres are the property of the com-
munities that use them rather than linguistic strategies for achieving general rhe-
torical goals in a culture, and analysts look to the specific practices of those groups.
Recurrent communicative acts are “the genres which orchestrate verbal life”
(Swales, 1998, p. 20), linking the past with the present, structuring the roles of
community members, and allowing individuals to express both their membership
and identities. While “community” is a somewhat contested and uncertain con-
cept, the fact that people acquire, use, and modify texts in the course of acting as
members of academic, occupational, or social groups offers a powerful way of
describing both genres and the communities which use them.

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2361 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM

 2362 Genre and Second Language Writing

Although analyzing schematic structures has proved an invaluable way of look-

ing at texts, analysts are increasingly aware of the dangers of ignoring writers’
personal intentions and of producing descriptions which simply reflect the
­analyst’s intuitions. Research has therefore moved towards examining clusters of
register, style, lexis, and other features which often distinguish particular genres
and the different moves within them.

­Pedagogical Implications

The reservations that New Rhetoricians have about the value of teaching gen-
res means that teaching largely involves investigating the activities that go on
around texts: how they are produced, negotiated and evolve in social, cultural,
and institutional contexts. Quasi-ethnographic, rather than linguistic, research
tools are widely employed to study the attitudes and values of the communi-
ties which employ particular genres. Students are encouraged to research audi-
ences and communities to understand how genres are used, so that they are
involved in active problem-solving or as participant observers in their univer-
sity classes.
Perhaps the most clearly articulated and pedagogically successful lines of
teaching have focused on genre-as-text to assist learners to explore the lexico-
grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres. For teachers this means
organizing instruction around the genres that learners need and the social con-
texts in which they will operate (Hyland, 2004). For both SFL and ESP practition-
ers this typically involves scaffolding instruction to guide learners towards
control of a genre based on whole texts selected in relation to learner needs.
Scaffolding refers to the supportive behaviors by which an expert can help a
­novice learner to gradually achieve higher, independent levels of performance.
This involves active and sustained support by a teacher through modeling, text
analysis and guidance in the use of appropriate strategies for meeting particular
purposes.
Texts and tasks are selected according to learners’ needs, and genres are mod-
eled explicitly to provide learners with something to aim for, an understanding of
what readers are likely to expect. One approach widely used in Australia is the
teaching-learning cycle which helps inform the planning of classroom activities by
showing the process of learning a genre as a series of linked stages. Here the
teacher provides initial explicit knowledge and guided practice, moves to sharing
responsibility for developing texts and gradually withdraws support until the
learner can work alone. The key stages of the cycle are:

●● setting the context—to reveal genre purposes and the settings in which it is
commonly used;
●● modeling—analyzing representative samples of the genre to identify its stages
and key features and the variations which are possible;

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2362 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM

 Genre and Second Language Writing 2363

●● joint construction—teacher-guided practice through tasks which focus on par-

ticular stages or functions of the genre;
●● independent construction—independent writing by students monitored by the
teacher comparing—relating what has been learned to other genres and con-
texts to understand how genres are designed to achieve particular purposes.
Each of these stages therefore seeks to achieve a different purpose, and so is
associated with different types of classroom activities and teacher-learner roles
(Hyland, 2004, pp. 130–40).
Genre pedagogies also encourage, especially in ESP classrooms, rhetorical
­consciousness-raising: a “top-down” approach to understanding language which
encourages writers to see grammatical features as “the on-line processing compo-
nent of discourse and not the set of syntactic building blocks with which discourse
is constructed” (Rutherford, 1987, p. 104). Basically, this involves training students
to read rhetorically and to reflect on the practices they observe and use themselves.
Teachers do this by exposing learners to texts from a variety of contexts and setting
tasks which involve analyzing the genres students need, helping them to notice
how salient features are used and meanings expressed. This can also be achieved
by promoting contrastive reflection, asking learners to compare how features are
used in different texts (Hyland, 2004), or by producing mixed-genre portfolios
(e.g., Johns, 1997).
Genre pedagogies are based on the idea that explicit instruction makes
­valued genres visible and so demystifies the kinds of writing that will provide
access to a greater range of life choices. For some critics, however, providing
students with models stifles their creativity and lends itself to an uncritical
reproduction of texts. There are dangers here, of course, but there is nothing
inherently prescriptive in genre teaching and by providing learners with an
explicit rhetorical understanding of texts, and a metalanguage with which to
analyse them, they can more effectively exercise choice while questioning the
authority of such texts.

­Conclusions

The potential advantages of genre-based writing instruction can be summarized

like this (Hyland, 2004). Genre teaching can be:

Explicit Makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of

writing skills.
Systematic Provides a framework for focusing on both language and
contexts.
Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from
Needs-based 
­students’ needs.
Supportive Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students’ learning.
Empowering Provides access to the patterns and variations in valued texts.

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2363 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM

 2364 Genre and Second Language Writing

Critical Gives students the resources to understand and challenge valued

discourses.
Awareness Increases teachers’ awareness of texts to advise students on
writing.

While these features are not unique to genre pedagogy, no other approach real-
izes them all. Perhaps the most important feature is that the approach sets out to
provide students with an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured
and why they are written in the ways they are. This explicitness gives teachers and
learners something to aim at, making writing outcomes clear rather than relying
on hit-or-miss inductive methods where learners are expected to acquire the g­ enres
they need by simply writing or from the teacher’s feedback on it. In other words,
by providing writers with a knowledge of appropriate language, genre approaches
can shift writing instruction from the implicit and exploratory to a conscious
manipulation of language choices.

SEE ALSO: Communities of Practice; Consciousness-Raising Tasks; English for

Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP); Grammar and
Second Language Writing; Workplace Writing; Writing Across Communities

References

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Freedman, A. (1994). “Do as I say”: The relationship between teaching and learning new
genres. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric. (pp. 191–210).
London, England: Taylor & Francis.
Hyland, K. (2004). Genre and second language writing. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: Developing academic literacies. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Martin, J. R. (2012) Genre studies. Vol. 3: Collected works of J. R. Martin (Wang Zhenhua, Ed.).
Shanghai, China: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press.
Rutherford, W. (1987). Second language grammar: Learning and teaching. London, England:
Longman.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. (1998). Other floors, other voices: A textography of a small university building. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.

Suggested Readings

Feez, S. (1998). Text-based syllabus design. Sydney, Australia: Macquarie University/AMES.

Hyland, K. (2008). Genre and academic writing in the disciplines Language Teaching. 41(4):
543–62.

v4b_lbp-G.indd 2364 9/25/2017 8:40:20 PM