Using Genre-Based SLW Instruction: Recipes vs. Cooking

Using Genre-Based SLW Instruction: Recipes vs. Cooking

As I’ve mentioned in this class before, I have not taken English 402, and so what I know about genre-based writing instruction is only what I’ve picked up listening to other graduate students and instructors talk about their experiences. This week’s reading filled in gaps and answered most of my questions about how genres are used to teach writing.

When I would hear these other graduate students and instructors talk about their experience with genres, I would instantly try to relate what was being said to something within my experience (this is how we learn, and this is also how genres are used, according to the reading assignments this week). With my high school seniors, I would go through the genres I knew they would need to be familiar with for college, such as the expository paper, research paper, the reading response, etc. I also made sure we covered genres for day-to-day life; my students learned how to write a letter to the editor, a letter of complaint to a company, a resume for a summer job, and so on.

Was genre-based writing instruction covered when I was in the English Education program as an undergraduate? No, not explicitly. I knew that I needed to teach how to compose these types of writing, but I wasn’t told how. Intuitively, I knew that we needed to look at examples and discuss as a class the qualities of an effective specimen of the genre, and then we would practice. Of course, I studied education in the early 90s, and so much of what L1 compositionists are concerned with in regards to genre (power and ideology) had not made its way into the English Ed programs yet.

But this week’s readings explained further what genre-based writing instruction entails (beyond my “intuitive” knowledge) and dove into the theory behind teaching writing in this way (this intuitive knowledge vs. the concrete theory behind genre pedagogy is underscored in Hyland’s first chapter, page 20: “Genre pedagogy is based on the belief that learning is best accomplished through explicit awareness of language, rather than through experiment and exploration…”). As with so many facets of SLW, genres are dynamic. To teach how to communicate and socially participate through a genre – a letter to the editor, for example – an instructor can show many examples of such letters, discuss with the students what makes these letters effective, etc.; however, the instructor also needs to prepare the students for the instability of what they have just seen and learned. Students need to realize that, within the genre “letter to an editor,” there are distinctions and other questions that must be answered: Is this for a magazine or newspaper? What register does the message call for (who is the audience?)? What elemental genres are associated with the macrogenre, “letter to an editor”? According to Hyland, genres “blend and overlap” (29). Therefore, students need to understand that, to write a letter to an editor, they need to know how to assess context as social situation and how to determine integration of linguistic characteristics in order to effectively communicate within that genre. There is no definite recipe, but with a basic knowledge of cooking various dishes -- like knowing the basic structure of common genres -- one can put together an appropriate meal.

Interesting to me was the discussion of the three perspectives of genre in Hyland’s second chapter. While I was discouraged that there was no “right” answer on which was the best model to adopt, I saw value in all three and determined (before Hyland told me in the chapter summary), that which viewpoint to adopt probably depended upon several circumstances. Like Hyland, I find myself relating much more to the systemic functional linguistic viewpoint, as it appears more adaptable to L2 writing instruction. Viewing genres as theoretical frameworks that contain elemental genres as well discussing the relationship of texts and contexts would be the focus to teaching SLW (indeed, Hyland notes that “in functional linguistics, genre theory is a theory of how we use language to live” 26). To try to use the New Rhetoric view of genre with L2 pedagogy seems…well…too advanced.

Before someone accuses me of adhering to this ignorant notion that L2 writers cannot handle approaching genres as the powerful constructs that they are, I urge you to remember that Hyland explains that a NR approach means that one investigates a genre’s “social, cultural, and institutional contexts” (36). Many L2 writers may not have the firm grasp on genres that is necessary in order to approach them as the complex and dynamic social constructions that they are. I didn’t see this at first as I read Hyland, but I did realize this relation while reading my chosen article for this week, “Sidestepping our ‘scare words’”: Genre as a possible bridge between L1 and L2 compositionists.

In this article, Kimberly A Costino and Sunny Hyon attempt to reveal “the elephant in the room,” so to speak, between L1 and L2 compositionists. L1 compositionists (represented by Costino) tend to bristle at SLW terminology such as “practice” and “skills.” Through a perspective influenced by political theorists such as Therborn, Althusser, and Foucault, L1 compositionists are suspicious of an approach that would seem to indoctrinate writing students, that would perpetuate an “’autonomous model of literacy’” (Street qtd. in Costino and Hyon 27). On the other hand, L2 compositionists are attempting to show SLW students how to communicate in a second language, which often also involves learning how society behaves in a different culture. Words such as “ideology,” “power,” and “critical” tend to make L2 instructors worried that such a model may encourage students to resist what they’re trying to fit into.

This article is particularly relevant because Hyon (representing L2 compositionists) and Costino are sincerely attempting to put these uncomfortable loaded stigmas of these words to rest and come up with a common compositionists vocabulary. They recognize that the two areas (L1 composition and L2 composition) have many areas of commonality as well as many areas in which they could share resources beyond just terminology. The one word both areas agree upon, though, is “genre,” and so that is their starting point.

In their attempt to bridge this gap between the two disciplines, they are perhaps echoing what Hyland sets up as the distance between NR and SFL (as NR tends to see genres as potential power tools and SFL view genres as linguistic frameworks for living in particular cultural and language contexts).

It seems to me that all three of the perspectives Hyland illustrates have their place in SLW. Do I believe that SLW cannot learn to recognize, analyze, and construct genres in their L2 for the power tools they are? No. But I do believe that the basic linguistic structures need to be presented (not totally mastered, as I think these two approaches can work together). Ideally, these two approaches (SFL and NR) would collaborate just as Costino and Hyon do in this article to bridge the gap between L1 and L2 composition pedagogy.