Genre in Language Teaching, Professionals

Genre In language teaching, professionals have long realized the importance of various types of context. It is impossible to teach any language in isolation. Indeed, whether teaching written or verbal communication, such teaching will be shaped by the purpose of language use as well as its context in terms of the culture and social environment where the target language will be used. On this basis, the genre-based approach to language teaching recognizes the different purposes of language use, either in speaking or writing.

Hence, various academics have considered the potential of genre-based instruction and its potential benefits for students and teachers. This is the case of the two documents to be considered here, including an article by Devitt, Bawarshi and Reiff (2003) and a book by Bruce (2008). The article "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities," contains three essays - one by each respective author -- on the potential of genre-based instruction and linguistic communities to help teachers and students make progress on the platform of language learning and teaching.

What is interesting about these articles is that they highlight not only the benefits, but also the considerable challenges of approaching language teaching in this way. The first essay by Devitt, for example, focuses on the legal genre, the professional community that uses it, and the way in which non-community members are included by means of the language used. An interesting premise here is that non-community members such as juries do not necessarily connect the same meaning to legal utterances and professionals within the community.

Hence, a breakdown in communication occurs, creating further isolation, whereas the initial intention of the community genre is inclusion of non-community members. The central premise of the essay is that this discrepancy in perceived meanings can be used as a teaching platform to make students aware of different connotations and contexts. The second essay, by Bawarshi, focuses on the medical genre, where the main purpose of the medical history genre is to communicate more easily with patients.

An interesting phenomenon in this case is that language is used in such a way as to denote a specific "form of life," which implies that the physical is separate from the mental. Once again, this is an interesting platform from which to teach students about specific types of language to focus on specific communication needs without necessarily being a holistic approach to the reality of life.

The final essay takes a more academic approach, where the genre of ethnography is used to help students identify different types of language genres. The advantage of this is a wider focus and more pedagogical possibilities. In his book, Bruce (2008) also takes a wide, academic approach to genre-based instruction. He points to the fact, for example, that discourse competence involves not only linguistic prowess, but also an awareness of non-linguistic contextual factors.

Importantly, the author points out that there is significant disagreement and divergence among authors who promote genre-based language teaching, which makes a uniformly effective approach difficult to identify. With this in mind, the author uses the rest of his book to focus on the benefits and challenges of genre-based instruction, specifically as this applies to academic writing in English. The author makes a distinction between two specific types of genre: the social.