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...

The author makes a distinction between two specific types of genre: the social and the cognitive, where social genres refer to those types of writing for a particular culture context such as law or medicine. Cognitive genres, then, refer to genres such as academic documents, the discipline of ethnography, and so on. Based on these concepts, the author considers how genre instruction can be used for various levels of language learning, ending with a chapter on how genre knowledge can be promoted in an advanced writing class. Genre instruction can therefore be very useful to address a variety of language arts premises, but this approach is not without its challenges.
References

Bruce, I. (2008). Academic Writing and Genre: a Systematic Analysis. New York: Continuum

Devitt, A.J., Bawarshi, A. And Reiff, M.J. (2003, May). Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities. College English, Vol. 65, No. 5. Retrieved from: ttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3594252