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Genre in TEFL
Genre in TEFL
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Genre in TEFL
Last updated on 13 October, 2023
Once upon a time there lived a little girl in the middle of the forest. She was the most
beautiful little girl in the whole world and everyone who saw her wanted to marry her.
https://www.eslbase.com/tefl-a-z/genre 1/7
09/02/2024 20:55 Genre in TEFL
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin
nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of
Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along
with him.
The first text is socio-culturally recognisable as the beginning of a fairy story, because:
It is full of descriptive language and lists of adjectives which, although unnecessary for
adding meaning, add colour and make the writing more evocative.
It contains long sentences, with a lot of subsidiary clauses (compare this to the fairy
story).
Classroom activities to analyse genre in this way can help learners understand texts by using
top-down processing. It can also help when it comes to production. Writing a letter of
complaint, for example, requires an awareness of the features of that genre, which are
completely different from the features of an informal email.
Spoken genre
We can often identify spoken genres in terms of moves. The process of ordering a drink at a
bar, for example, has a set of clearly defined moves, and may go something like this:
↓ ↓
↓ ↓
↓ ↓
↓ ↓
↓ ↓
The number and likely sequences of moves, and the range, style and register of likely
language is fairly limited, making this a particularly strong spoken genre. Using flow charts in
this way can therefore be very useful for learners to recognise the organisational structure of
an interaction in a particular genre, and to see where a particular piece of language fits in to
the overall interaction.
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