This document discusses genre analysis and its application to academic writing. It provides an overview of different frameworks for analyzing genres, including focusing on communicative purposes, rhetorical needs, or language functions. The document also examines genres in different fields, such as narratives in history writing. Historians write arguments through narrating events from different points of view. Students are often taught to reproduce "correct" answers rather than developing their own historical arguments, but should be encouraged to take their own stance and form autonomous interpretations of the past.

1. Genre Analysis
Prepared by:
ASSASLA Karima

2. Main Parameters
Frameworks Elements Criteria
Discourse production and reception in
various general and academic fields.

3. What is Genre Analysis???
• Swales 1990: Gave an overview of the different meanings
the term has in the fields of:

4. A Genre comprises:
A class of communicative events: the members
of which share some set of communicative
purpose.
Recognized by the expert members of the
discourse community and therefore constitute
the rationale for the genre.
shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and
influences and constrains choice of content and
style.

5. Exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of
similarity in terms of structure, style, content and
intended audience.
The Prototypical by the parent discourse
community.
The genre names inherited and
produced by the discourse communities
and imported by others constitute valuable
ethnographic communication.

6. Five major characteristics
1- Class of communicative events: the
discourse itself, the participants, and the
role of discourse and environment of its
production and reception, its historical
and cultural association.
2- Some shared set of communicative
purposes: some purposes are easily
determined (cooking recipe, newspaper
article...etc)

7. while others are difficult to establish (academic
writings...etc).
3- Exemplars or instances of genre vary in
their prototypicality two basic ideas or
principles in the identification of the genre
type:
a- "definitional idea": simple properties,
necessary and sufficient enough to identify
all the members and only the members of a
particular category from everything else.

8. Eg. dictionaries, glossaries, and specialised
technologies.
b- "family membership idea": kinship
relations of category members (furniture:
chair, apple: fruit...etc

9. 4- The rationale behind a genre establishes
constraints on allowable contributions in
terms of their content, positioning and
form.
5- A discourse community's nomenclature
for genres is an important source of
insight: active members of a discourse
community give genre names to classes of
communicative events -specific to them-

10. which may be adopted/ adapted by
overlapping/peripheral or common discourse
community. Names given to genre change
their meaning through time and may be
inherited from previous generations. Some
genres do not obligatorily have names.

11. Nunan (1993): focuses on the importance of
language functions to determine the genre
type adopted by functional linguists to
refer to different types of communicative ev-
ents.
language exists to fulfil certain functions and
that these functions will determine the overall
shape or generic structure of the discourse.

12. Dudley-Evans (1994), on the other hand, focu-
ses on the importance of rhetorical needs to
determine the needs of a communicative purp-
ose rather than the type of genre:
a genre is a means of achieving a communica-
tive goal evolved in response to particular
rhetorical needs and that a genre will change
and evolve in response to changes in those
needs.

13. The emphasis is thus on the means by which
a text realises its communicative purpose
rather than on establishing a system for the
classification of genre.

14. Story-telling and newspaper English can be
considered as typical genres.
Schiffrin (1987) provides a careful genre anal-
ysis of story-telling and the outcome of her
study determined the structure of the narrati-
ve and the argument.

15. She distinguishes four discourse moves
which figure prominently in conversational
story-telling and considers them as perman-
ent moves story-tellers use in their stories.

16. initiating the story;
reporting events within the story;
conveying the point of the story;
accomplishing an action through the story.
Two modes of argumentative discourse
monologic and dialogic

17. An argument is a discourse through which
speakers support disputable positions:
the textual relations between, and the
arrangement of, position and support is
monologic.
The interactional dispute (challenge, defence,
rebuttal, and so on) is dialogic.

18. She defines the moves of the argument:
The position: a key part of a position is an
idea (descriptive information about situations,
states, events and actions and speaker
commitment to that idea (assertion, claim
to the truth).
The dispute: opposition to any one part of a
position, to propositional content

19. For Stockton 1995:
Narrating the subject of time seems to be a
crucial element in History writings. Even if it
is common sense to think that History is an
academic field that narrates past events, he
comes to the conclusion that all History
writings ‘narrate a story from different
points of view’

20. They are sometimes indirect and obscure
because they may rely on reference to
background knowledge not explicitly present-
ed in a text.
The support: supporting a position through
explanation of an idea, justification of a
commitment.

21. The naïve distinction between biased and
unbiased points of view has disintegrated
into what has increasingly come to be seen
as the lost dream of objectivity.
There are no “objective” stories, and the work
of theorists has been to show how different
types of historical arguments are inherently
lodged in different kinds of narrative.

22. The historian’s argument is his or her
“interpretation” of the available “evidence”,
and “narration is the way in which a
historical interpretation is achieved”. History
thus becomes a “discursive event”- the
story.’

23. The main language functions found in the
academic field of History are narration and
argument
Whatever the past event historians write
about, the importance does not lie in
whether historians are telling the truth but in
the fact that all of them consider the
epistemological status of history as
argument.

24. This consequently makes of History writings slightly
‘particularistic’ to other academic fields like psycholo
gy or business studies.

25. Writing in History. Narrating the Subject of Time
By SHARON STOCKTON

26. The topic of the article:
The article is mainly about research in writing
across the curriculum and the recent focus on
disciplinary specificity in writing and knowing.
Disciplinary context in relation to student and
professional writing is considered to be of
paramount importance. Research has shown that
faculty and teachers are not aware of disciplinary
expectations and less often capable of
articulating them. Therefore, the student or
apprentice writer is not provided with advice
about the conventions that structure writing and
thought in the academic disciplines.

27. Theoritical framework:
This work draws on the general findings of
S.Wineburg(1991) and J. Langer (1992) but goes
further toward identifying the unique nature of
historical writing that is expected of students. Their
findings show that students have a less critical view
of historical documents and are more willing than
professional historians to believe in the possibility of
one true story of the past.

28. Langer’s interviews with history instuctors reveal the
extent to which a desire to cover course content
ultimately drives not only the curriculum but also
expectations for writing in history, despite the explicit
expression of commitment by teachers to
encouraging in students, above all else, higher order
thinking skills( argument mainly).

29. Sharon Stockton intends to examine in more
details this contradiction between the explicit and
implicit faculty expectations of student writing in
history. Therefore, this project bridges a gap
between the work of scholars in rhetorical and
composition and that of theorists of history to
define more precisely the inexplicit or hidden rules
of academic historical discourse that students are
expected to learn.

30. Tools and Methogology:
The research was conducted at the Liberal Arts
School in south central Pennsylvania. It was a
study of writing and writing expectations in the
Department of History. The researcher accumulate
data through faculty interviews, syllabi,
assignments, comments on students’ papers,
publications, and student interviews and papers.
Data were gathered between the fall semester of
1991 and the spring semster of 1994.

31. Interviews were conducted during the academic
year 1991-1992 with 12 out of 13 regular
faculty members in the History Department. All
writing assignments were distributed to
students by the same 12 faculty members
during that same period. Students writing was
graded from 10 different courses taught by 8
different professors. The information gathered
was shaped into a report that was presented
back to the department.

32. Interpretation of Results:
The researcher thoroughly analysed students’
writing assignments, teachers’ comments on
those assignments, students’ responses to the
comments of their teachers, and the grades
given to students.

33. Results:
- Evaluation reveals a great deal about how certain
shapes of writing and knowing are valued
above others and how such prioritization is
communicated or not to students.

34. Results:
- The roadblocks all 12 faculty members claimed to
be central to students’ learning of history did not
include the failure to narrate.The articulated
problems consisted rather in a collective inability to
see the arguments of others and to take stance
of their own.

35. Results:
They all agreed that students’ major failing is that
they write passively without taking a stance.

36. Proposed Solutions to the Problem:
- Students are highly advised to take authority on
themselves when they write, to write
autonomously, forming their own history.

37. Proposed Solutions to the Problem:
Steffens (1987) explained that ‘’The problem is
that students assume that we already know the
answer to our own question, and that there is only
one good response. They believe they must
reproduce ‘’our’’ answer, rather more than less
exactly, leaving little room for innovative or original
thinking. Students don’t acquire a sense that they
are writing a piece of history of their own. (p.219)

38. Proposed Solutions to the Problem:
Langer (1992) found that history instructors place
high priority on what is conceived as an original
argument ‘’taking sides on controversial issues,
providing supporting evidence’’ (p.79)

39. Proposed Solutions to the Problem:
Walvoord and McCarthy(1990) found in the history
course they examine that the expectations of their
history instructor was that: the difference between
the basic historical study, of the sort that ought to
be go on in high school, and history as what
historians actually do is argument.
- Historians read and write opinionated arguments
about what the past was like.

40. Proposed Solutions to the Problem:
- History courses should introduce students to the
concept of conflicting opinions on print, and
teaching them to recognize and adopt a critical
approach to the opinions of others. Autonomous
demonstration of oppositional rhetoric.

41. Mandelbaum (1977) pointed out: ‘’it is not the
thought or action of any individual ...with which the
historian is concerned, it is not the human
individual in history who is central to the subject of
history; it is, rather, the human who writes history
and is written by it.’’

42. Two tasks for historians as teachers:
1- To be more self-conscious of this distinction
2- To become more reflective about their
disciplinary enterprise.