Hyland, K. (2013). Genre and Discourse Analysis in Language for Specific Purposes. In C.

Chappele (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Genre and Discourse Analysis in Language for Specific Purposes

Language for specific purposes (LSP) refers to a distinctive approach to language education which
focuses on the particular linguistic features, discourse practices and communicative skills used by target
groups. Its success therefore depends on accurately identifying what these features and practices are so
they can be taught to students, and this has been greatly assisted over the past 20 years by the emergence
of genre analysis. Genre analysis has become established as one of the most popular and productive
frameworks for the study of specialized communication in academic, professional and institutional
contexts. Essentially, the approach is used to describe texts within textual and social contexts, rejecting
the idea that individual texts should be treated in isolation from either their use or other texts. This brief
entry will offer an overview of the importance of genre in this area of research and pedagogy.

Discourse and genre analysis

Discourse analysis is a collection of methods for studying language in action, looking at texts in relation
to the social contexts in which they are used, but this broad definition has been interpreted in various ways
across the social sciences. This is because language is an irreducible part of social life, and connected to
almost everything we do. Discourse analysis, in fact, spreads between two poles giving more-or-less
emphasis to concrete texts or to institutional social practices, but generally tending to focus on language
phenomena which occur above the sentence. Genre analysis, on the other hand, is a more specific form of
discourse analysis which focuses on any element of recurrent language use, including grammar and lexis,
which is relevant to the analyst’s interests. Genres are the recurrent uses of more-or-less conventionalized
forms through which individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done using
language. As a result, genre analysis sees texts as representative of wider rhetorical practices and so has the
potential to offer descriptions and explanations of both texts and the communities that use them.

Genre analysts set out to offer descriptions of "typified acts of communication" based on the form and
purposes of texts. Basically, genres are kinds of broad rhetorical templates that writers draw on to respond to
repeated situations; users see certain language choices as representing effective ways of getting things done
in familiar contexts. Genre analysis is therefore based on the assumption that the features of a similar group
of texts depend on the social context of their creation and use, and that those features can be described in a

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way that relates a text to others like it and to the choices and constraints acting on text producers. This is the
very stuff of communication. O'Sullivan et al (1994: 128), for instance, argue that ‘genres are agents of
ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text’ while writers can rely on readers
already having some knowledge and expectations about the conventions of a genre. We know immediately,
for example, whether a text is an essay, a joke or a recipe, but we can also recognise innovation, irony and
creativity. Genres can thus be seen as a kind tacit contract between writers and readers, which influence the
behaviour of text producers and the expectations of receivers.

While approaches to genre differ considerably in the emphasis they give to text or context, the research
methods they employ, and the types of pedagogies they encourage, text analytic varieties have had most
impact in LSP contexts. These approaches are influenced by Halliday’s (1994) view of language as a
system of choices which link texts to particular contexts through patterns of lexico-grammatical and
rhetorical features (Christie & Martin, 1997) and by Swales’ (1990) observation that these recurrent
choices are closely related to the work of particular discourse communities whose members share broad
social purposes. These purposes are a key element of the context of a text and the rationale of a genre;
they help to shape the ways it is structured and the choices of content and style it makes available. The
following sections discuss the aspects of language usually studied, the relationship between genre and
context, and the application of research to pedagogy.

Genre structures and features

Some of this research has followed the move analysis work pioneered by Swales’ (1990) which seeks to
identify the recognisable stages of particular institutional genres and the constraints on typical move
sequences. Moves are the typical rhetorical steps which writers or speakers use to develop their social
purposes, and recent work on academic genres has produced descriptions of the results sections in
research articles (Bruce, 2009), dissertation acknowledgments (Hyland, 2004c) and grant proposals
(Connor, 2000). In professional contexts, research has explored the structures of genres in direct mail
letters (Upton, 2002) and in management and legal cases (Lung, 2008).

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While analysing schematic structures has proved an invaluable way of looking at texts, analysts are
increasingly aware of the dangers of oversimplifying by assuming blocks of texts to be mono-functional
and ignoring writers’ complex purposes and “private intentions” (Bhatia, 1999). There is also the
problem raised by Crookes (1986) of validating analyses to ensure they are not simply products of the
analyst’s intuitions. Transitions from one move to another in a text are, of course, always motivated
outside the text as writers respond to their social context, but analysts have not always been
convincingly able to identify the ways these shifts are explicitly signalled by lexico-grammatical
patterning.

Research has therefore tended to move more towards examining clusters of register, style, lexis and
other features which often distinguish particular genres. One feature of academic genres to receive
attention is writers’ use of evaluative that constructions in articles and dissertations (Hyland & Tse,
2005), a structure which allows a writer to thematize evaluative meanings by presenting a complement
clause following that (as in We believe that this is an interesting construction). Other recent studies
have looked at circumstance adverbials in student presentations (Zareva, 2009), interactive features of
undergraduate lectures (Morrell, 2004), and the common 4-word collocations, or lexical bundles, in
student dissertations (Hyland, 2008). In other domains, research has identified genre characteristics
such as the use of conjunctive cohesion in EU documents (Trebits, 2009) and metadiscourse markers in
professional emails (Jenson, 2009). A feature of much recent work has been how persuasion in various
genres is not only accomplished through the ways ideas are presented, but also by the construction of an
appropriate authorial self and the negotiation of participant relationships.

Genre and community

The importance of genre to LSP studies results from the growing body of evidence that professional and
academic discourses represent a variety of specific literacies so that what counts as convincing
argument, appropriate tone, persuasive interaction, and so on, is managed for a particular audience
(Hyland, 2004a). More specifically, researchers have become sensitive to the ways genres are written
and responded to by individuals acting in concert with others. This community-based orientation to
literacy draws attention to the idea that we communicate as members of social groups, each with its own
norms, categorizations, sets of conventions, and ways of doing things.
Essentially, members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognising similarities in the texts
they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such texts to read,
understand and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is, in part, because writing is a practice based
on expectations. The process of writing involves creating a text that the writer assumes the reader will
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recognise and expect and the process of reading involves drawing on assumptions about what the writer
is trying to do. Each assembles sense from a text by anticipating what the other is likely to do by
making connections to prior texts.

Genre analysis therefore reveals the ways that genres reflect and construct the communities that use
them, as Swales (1998: 20) observes:
In-group abbreviations, acronyms, argots, and other special terms flourish and multiply;
beyond that, these discourse communities evolve their own conventions and traditions for
such diverse verbal activities as running meetings, producing reports, and publicizing their
activities. These recurrent classes of communicative events are the genres that orchestrate
verbal life. These genres link the past and the present, and so balance forces for tradition and
innovation. They structure the roles of individuals within wider frameworks, and further
assist those individuals with the actualisation of their communicative plans and purposes.
The idea that people acquire, use, and modify texts while acting as members of academic, occupational,
or social groups offers a powerful way of describing communities and understanding the
communication needs of students in professional and academic contexts.

A recent development in genre studies has been the growth of ethnographic approaches as a way of
accessing features of the context and of the processes of production that may explain particular aspects
of genres. Research into situated academic discourse, such as John Swales’ “textography” (1998) and
Ann Johns’ “students as researchers” work (1997), indicates how ethnographic methods, such as
observation of physical sites of genre activity and interviews with individuals who read or write a genre,
can provide access to these communities and their genre use.

Genre constellations
Another aspect of context lies in the ways that texts relate to other texts, forming ‘constellations’ with
neighbouring genres (Swales, 2004). An important aspect of such constellations is that we almost never
find genres in isolation. A useful concept here is that of ‘genre sets’ to refer to the part of the entire
genre constellation that a particular individual or group engages in, either productively or receptively
(Devitt, 1991). Textbooks, lab reports and lectures, for instance, may be key genres for many science
students while discussion postings and on-line tutorials are genres more familiar to distance students on
TESOL programmes. We can also approach genre constellations through ‘genre chains’, which refers
to how spoken and written texts cluster together in a given social activity. Thus genres sometimes

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follow each other in a predictable chronological order, such as a job application which involves a step-
wise procedure through job advertisements, curriculum vitae, applications letters, interviews, and so on.

Moving beyond the immediate context to the wider ‘context of culture’, genres can be seen as
institutional social practices. From this perspective, genres are loosely arrayed in a network as each
interacts with, draws on, and responds to another in a particular setting. This refers to Bakhtin’s (1986)
concept of intertextuality and the fact that every utterance reacts to other utterances in that domain.
While this totality is constantly changing, analysis can help show how text users are linked into a
network of prior texts according to their group membership. These interconnections can be
characterized as both intertextual and interdiscursive. “Interdiscursivity,” concerns the use of elements
in a text which carry institutional and social meanings from other discourses, reflecting the conventions,
values, and practices of neighbouring discourses.

One example of how an institutional genre is linked into a web of interdiscursivity is the undergraduate
syllabus (Afros & Schryer, 2009: 231) which is not only linked with other course documents and texts
but also to wider understandings of the institution and the discipline itself. As the authors point out:
The syllabus reveals that the social creation of knowledge taking place in the course
draws on lectures, textbooks, and other in-class and out-of-class learning/teaching
activities as much as on the ongoing discussion in the academic field, adult education,
university policies, and many other texts and communities. Instructors utilize the
syllabus not only to manifest their membership in multiple discourse communities, but
also to socialize students into (at least, some of) them.
Thus, the syllabus thus highlights the interdependences between the classroom, research, and

institutional genres.

Genre pedagogies

The findings produced by genre studies have had a major impact on LSP teaching. This is because genre
descriptions ground teaching in research and support learners through an explicit understanding of how
target texts are structured and the reasons they are written as they are. The potential advantages of
genre-based instruction for writing can be summarised like this (Hyland 2004b):
Explicit Makes clear what is to be learnt to facilitate the acquisition of writing skills.
Systematic Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language and contexts.
Needs-based Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from target needs.

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Supportive Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students’ learning and creativity.
Empowering Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valued texts.
Critical Gives students the resources to understand and challenge valued discourses.
Consciousness Increases teachers’ awareness of texts confidently to advise students on writing
raising
While these characteristics are not unique to genre pedagogy, no other approach seeks to realise them
all.

LSP practitioners employ genre pedagogies as a means of emphasising what is to be learned, organising
instruction around the genres that learners need and the social contexts in which they will operate
(Hyland, 2004b). This typically involves adopting a scaffolded pedagogy to guide learners towards
control of a genre based on whole texts selected in relation to learner needs. Based on sociocultural
learning theory (Vygotsky, 1978), scaffolding is a metaphor of learning which refers to the supportive
behaviours by which an expert can help a novice learner to gradually achieve higher, independent levels
of performance. In LSP classrooms it involves active and sustained support by a teacher who models
appropriate strategies for meeting particular purposes, guides students in their use of the strategies, and
provides a meaningful and relevant context for using the strategies.

Texts and tasks are therefore selected according to learners’ needs and genres are modelled explicitly to
provide learners with something to aim for, an understanding of what readers are likely to expect. One
approach widely used in Australia is the teaching-learning cycle (e.g. Feez, 1998) which helps inform
the planning of classroom activities by showing the process of learning a genre as a series of linked
stages. Here the teacher provides initial explicit knowledge and guided practice, moves to sharing
responsibility for developing texts and gradually withdraws support until the learner can work alone.
The key stages of the cycle are:
 setting the context – to reveal genre purposes and the settings in which it is commonly used
 modelling – analysing representative samples of the genre to identify its stages and key
features and the variations which are possible.
 joint construction – guided, teacher-supported practice in the genre through tasks which focus
on particular stages or functions of the text.
 independent construction – independent writing by students monitored by the teacher
 comparing – relating what has been learnt to other genres and contexts to understand how
genres are designed to achieve particular social purposes.

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Each of these stages therefore seeks to achieve a different purpose, and so is associated with different
types of classroom activities and teacher-learner roles (Hyland, 2004: 130-40).

Critiques
Genre approaches have not been uncritically adopted in LSP classrooms however. Situated learning theorists
(e.g. Dias & Pare, 2000), for example, argue that writing is always part of the goals and occasions that bring
it about and it cannot be learnt in the inauthentic context of the classroom. Such a view, however, ignores
the fact that L2 students are often at a considerable disadvantage in such unfamiliar naturalistic settings and
that genre-based teaching can short-cut the long processes of situated acquisition. Critical theorists have also
attacked genre teaching, both for accommodating learners to existing modes of practice and to the values and
ideologies of the dominant culture that valued genres embody (e.g. Benesch, 2001). Genre proponents,
however, contend that this argument can be levelled at almost all teaching approaches, and that learning
about genres does not preclude critique but, in fact, provides a necessary basis for critical engagement with
cultural and textual practices.

Finally, genre teachers have had to defend themselves against process adherents and the charge that genre
instruction inhibits writers’ self expression and straightjackets creativity through conformity and
prescriptivism (e.g. Dixon, 1987). Obviously the dangers of a static, decontextualized pedagogy are very real
if teachers fail to acknowledge variation and apply what Freedman (1994:46) calls “a recipe theory of genre”.
But there is nothing inherently prescriptive in a genre approach. There is no reason why providing students
with an understanding of discourse should be any more prescriptive than, say, providing them with a
description of a clause or the parts of a sentence. The fact is that genres do have a constraining power which
inevitably limits the originality of individual writers. Selecting a particular genre implies the use of certain
patterns, but this does not dictate the way we write: it enables us to make choices and facilitates expression.
The ability to create meaning is only made possible by the possibility of alternatives. By ensuring these
options are available to students we give them the opportunity to make such choices, and for many LSP
learners this awareness of regularity and structure is both facilitating and reassuring.

Conclusions

LSP instruction seeks to help demystify prestigious forms of discourse, unlock students’ creative and
expressive abilities, and facilitate their access to greater life chances. To accomplish these goals teachers
require a systematic means of describing texts and of making their students’ control over them more
achievable. In short, a well-formulated theory of how language works in human interaction has become an
urgent necessity in the field of teaching languages for specific purposes. Genre pedagogies are a major

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response to this need, providing teachers with a way of understanding how writing is shaped by individuals
making language choices to achieve purposes in social contexts.

SEE ALSO: Critical English for Academic Purposes; Genre-Based Language Teaching; Swales, John;
Systemic Functional Grammar; Writing and Genre Studies;

References
Afros, E & Schryer, C.F. (2009). The genre of syllabus in higher education. Journal of English for
Academic Purposes. 8, 3: 224-233
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for Academic Purposes. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bhatia, V. K. (1999). Integrating products, processes, processes and participants in professional writing.
In C.N. Candlin, & K. Hyland (eds.), Writing: Texts, Processes and Practices. (pp. 21-39).
London: Longman.
Bruce, I, (2009). Results sections in sociology and organic chemistry articles: A genre analysis English
for Specific Purposes 28, 2: 105-124
Christie, F., & Martin, J. R. (eds.). (1997). Genre in institutions: Social processes in the workplace and
school. New York: Continuum.
Connor, U. (2000). Variations in rhetorical moves in grant proposals of US humanists and scientists.
Text, 20(1), 1-28.
Crookes, G. (1986). Towards a validated analysis of scientific text structure. Applied Linguistics, 7, 57-
70.
Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting. in C. Bazerman, & J. Paradisi (eds.), Textual
dynamics of the professions (pp. 336-57). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dias, P., & Pare, P. (eds.). (2000). Transitions: writing in academic and workplace settings. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press.
Dixon, J. (1987). The question of genres. In I. Reid (ed.) The place of genre in learning: current debates.
(pp 9-21). Geelong, Australia: Deakin University
Eggins, S. 1994. An introduction to systemic functional linguistics. London: Pinter.
Feez, S. (1998). Text-based syllabus design . Sydney: Mcquarie University/AMES.
Freedman, A. (1994). "Do as I say?": the relationship between teaching and learning new genres. In
A. Freedman, & P. Medway (eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 191-210). London: Taylor
and Francis.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd Ed.). London: Edward Arnold.

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Hyland, K. (2004a) Disciplinary Discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2004b). Genre and Second language writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2004c). ‘Graduates’ gratitude: the generic structure of dissertation acknowledgements’.
English for Specific Purposes, 23(3), 303-24.
Hyland, K. (2008a). ‘As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation’. English for
Specific Purposes, 27(1), 4-21.
Hyland, K. & Tse, P. (2005). Evaluative that constructions: signalling stance in research abstracts.
Functions of Language. 12 (1): 39-64
Jensen, A. (2009). Discourse strategies in professional e-mail negotiation: a case study. English for
Specific Purposes 28, 1: 4-18.
Johns, A.M. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies. New York: Cambridge.
University Press.
Lung, J. (2008). Discursive hierarchical patterning in Law and Management cases. English for Specific
Purposes. 27, 4: 424-441
Morell, T. (2004). Interactive lecture discourse for university EFL students. English for Specific
Purposes 23, 3: 325-338
O'Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M. & Fiske, J. (1994): Key Concepts in
Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Swales, J. (1998). Other floors, other voices: A textography of a small university building. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. New York: CUP.
Trebits, A. (2009). Conjunctive cohesion in English language EU documents – A corpus-based analysis
and its implications. English for Specific Purposes. 28, 3, 199-210
Upton, T. (2002 Understanding direct mail letters as a genre. International Journal of Corpus
Linguistics, 7, 1: 65-85.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. in M. Cole,
V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman (eds). Harvard, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Zareva, A. (2009). Informational packaging, level of formality, and the use of circumstance adverbials
in L1 and L2 student academic presentations. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8, 1: 55-
68

Suggested Readings

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 Belcher, D. (Ed.) (2009). English for Specific Purposes in theory and practice. Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press.

Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.
Candlin, C.N. (Ed.) Research and Practice in Professional Discourse. Hong Kong. City University of

Hong Kong Press.

Dudley-Evans, T., & St. John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for Specific Purposes. A

Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hyland, K. (2006). English for Academic Purposes: an advanced resource book. London: Routledge.

Hyland, K. (2009). Academic Discourse. London: Continuum.

Johns, A. (ed). (2002) Genre in the classroom: multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. New York: CUP.

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