2. A genre-based model of language
★ Language is processed in the form of a text.
★ It could be any meaning-producing event.
★ It can be seen as a thing in itself that can be recorded,
analysed and discussed.
★ It can be seen also as a process that is the outcome of a
social produced occasion.
3. How do we learn to use language?
★ Language is both natural and cultural, individual and
social.
★ Progressivism promoted language as a natural
individualistic phenomenon.
★ There is also a view that learning to speak and write are
identical processes, both acquire naturally and through
immersion.
★ But speech and writing have a different organization in
structure, grammar, function and purpose.
4. ★ Speech can be described as temporal, immediate and
sequential.
★ Writing is an inscription and it is in a spatial medium.
★ In casual speech, clause follows clause and is linked by
intonation and by conjunctions.
★ In writing, we arrange clauses into sentences: the main
idea becomes the main clause, subsidiary ideas become
subordinate clauses.
★ According to the socio-linguistic view, the ability to
produce language is enterely social, leaving no space
for the individual writer and his or her creativity.
★ The genre, text and grammar model recognises that while
language is produced by individuals, its shape and
structure is social determined.
5. What is genre, text and grammar model of language?
★ The genre, text and grammar model of written language
asks why a particular type of writing works better than
another.
★ The aim of this approach is to provide students with the
ability to use the codes of writing.
7. Context
★ Texts are always produced in a context.
★ They always relate to a social environment and to other texts.
★ “Context of situation” describes immediate environment.
★ “Context of culture” describes the system of beliefs, values and
attitudes that speakers bring with them into any social
interaction.
★ Context has the potential to “actualise” events in the form of a
text.
★ Context being talked or written as representational meaning.
★ Social relations between participants as interpersonal meaning.
★ The medium of the language event as textual meaning.
★ Context is seen as a virtual force acting on and generating
language events in order to get things done.
8. Genre
★ Genre refers to the language proceses involved in doing things
with language.
★ It is theorised as an abstraction of real-life, everyday texts.
★ Genres are classified according to their social purpose.
★ They are formed in the processes of social interactions.
★ They are seen as a core set of generic processes(describing,
explaining, instructing, arguing and narrating)
★ It doesn't matter what label we give a text, but rather that we
know what the text is doing.
9. Text
A text stands alone as an act of communication and can be
classified in many ways: everyday, formal, entertaining and
informational.
Literary texts Factual texts Media texts
10. Literary
texts
★ They reflect and interpret individual and social life, whether real or
imaginary.
★ They often use language to create images in readers´minds.
★ They make use of figural language.
★ They include novels, epics, poems, dramas and sagas.
Factual
texts
★ They primary aim is communicating knowledge.
★ Technical descriptions, explanations, procedures seek to be effective in
their transmission.
★ Essays, reviews and arguments take time to position and persuade readers.
Media
texts
★ They are any text that are used in channels of mass communication.
★ They can use different modes of communication: writing, speech, pictures or
sound.
★ An understanding of such texts would imply an understanding of the
technologies and modes of production of the respective media.
11. Grammar
★ Grammar is one of our key literacy technologies
★ Pedagogicalle, grammar becomes meaningful when it is linked to the purpose
and function of texts.
★ Different grammars for different purposes
★ Traditional typoe grammars were developed to describe and analyse the way
words are put together within sentences.
★ Genre-based grammar considers how a text is structured, organised and
coded so as to make it effective and how all the parts of the text are
used to serve the purposes of the language users.
★ Grammar needs to deal with language from three perspectives: the generic,
the textual and the syntactical.
★ Formal grammar classifies the bits and pieces that constitute sentences
and texts.
12. ★ Functional grammar helps us understand what the bits and pieces are doing.
★ Figural aspects of grammar look at how language can be used to create
images to carry additional meanings.
13. Connecting genre, text and grammar
Genre, text and grammar are the three basic categories
for this model of language. It is able to make
connections between:
★ Genre, the social context and relations in which texts
are produced.
★ Text, the language processes we use to construct
products.
★ Grammar, the choices and limitations language users have
when putting words together in texts.
14. Bibliography:
Genre, text and grammar. Technologies for teaching and
assessing writing. Peter Knapp and Megan Watkis. 2005.
Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
