Genre: Language, Context, and Literacy (original) (raw)

In the last decade genre approaches have had a considerable impact on the ways we understand discourse and in transforming literacy education in different contexts around the world. The purpose of this article is to review the main directions of recent literature in both these areas, showing how the concept of genre is beginning to offer applied linguists a socially informed theory of language and an authoritative pedagogy grounded in research of texts and contexts. In terms of language description, I describe recent studies which seek to elaborate our understanding of generic integrity and variation, the ways that genres are seen as similar and different in terms of their internal structures and as systems of social processes. This research focuses on the contexts, lexico-grammatical features and rhetorical patterns of genres. In terms of pedagogy, the paper considers how genre approaches address central issues of language education and crit-ical literacy and the ways that genre-pedagogies are applied in classrooms.