Building Genre Knowledge - Christine Tardy Second Language Writing

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not only gives a genre meaning, but also serves as a modus operandi for learning. That is, as new users of genres attempt to find the preferred ways of constructing genres and texts within a social setting, they often turn to previous texts that they have encountered (Kamberelis, 1995). They may borrow explicit textual fragments, they may draw on textual conventions or practices, or they may look to support genres like guidelines, feedback, or prior texts to learn how to communicate effectively. Learners may also draw on oral encounters surrounding texts, such as conversations with mentors, class discussions, or feedback from peers. Ivanič (1998) refers to these interactions as “intermental encounters” and illustrates through her research how such encounters may exert significant influence on writers.

      It should be clear from this discussion that genres relate to one another in a variety of ways. At the most general level, genres are intertextually networked, containing traces of prior texts. Beyond this level, scholarly terminology becomes confusing and even somewhat haphazard. Genres exist in conversation, as responses and rejoinders (Bakhtin, 1986), or uptakes (Freadman, 1994). Devitt (2004) refers to these dialogical relationships as genre sets, while Swales (2004) uses the term genre chains, drawing on Räisänen’s (1999) use of the term in describing crash safety; this latter metaphor seems to best capture the chronological and essentially interlinked nature of dialogue.

      A third level of generic relationship is Devitt’s (1991) originally-labeled genre set, which she has since re-named genre repertoire (Devitt, 2004), defining it as the set of genres owned by a given group. Devitt (2004) distinguishes a repertoire as larger and less tightly knit than a genre chain:

      Repertoire is an especially helpful term . . . for it connotes not only a set of interacting genres but also a set from which participants choose, a definer of the possibilities available to the group . . . The genres within a repertoire do interact, though often in less obvious ways, with less clear-cut sequencing and more indirect connections than exist in a genre system.” (p. 57)

      At the risk of adding more confusion to an already murky pool of terms, it seems to me that both repertoire and set are terminologically useful. While a repertoire might refer to all of a group’s available genres, a set might best refer to the genres available for a given rhetorical goal (e.g., genres for job promotion, genres for laboratory safety). Application of these terms immediately highlights their overlapping nature, yet I believe it is at times useful to distinguish sets from a full repertoire when considering the learning process. While the ultimate goal for novices may be access to a group’s full genre repertoire, this process is likely to occur through accumulated engagement with different genre sets.

      While a genre repertoire includes all of the genres owned by a given group, a genre system would include genres owned and used by multiple groups, all toward an ultimate rhetorical goal. Bazerman (1994) describes a genre system as

      . . . the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties—that is the full file of letters from and to the client, from and to the government, from and to the accountant. This would be the full interaction, the full event, the set of social relations as it has been enacted. (p. 99)

      For simplicity in referring to this myriad of intertextual relationships, I will use genre networks as an umbrella term. In cases where it is important to distinguish the different relationships among genres, I will use the more specified terms described above.

      A growing body of research has examined genre sets, repertoires, and systems, including those of tax accounting, patent law, psychotherapy paperwork, faculty tenure files, grant funding, and electronic communities (Bazerman, 1994; Berkenkotter, 2001; Devitt, 1991; Hyon & Chen, 2004; Samraj, 2005; Tardy, 2003; Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). In this book, however, I will push the notion of genre networks a bit further to consider what it has to offer to an understanding of genre learning. A focus on genres as discrete entities, for example, masks many of the important influences on the process of genre learning and on how writers’ involvement in larger social and textual systems may help or hinder that process. In the subsequent chapters, I will explore some of these influences as well as the ways in which participation in genre networks might help learners develop a more sophisticated understanding of the system’s core genres, including an understanding of how to manipulate those genres for their own purposes. In academic settings, these core genres might include research articles or proposals; in workplace settings, they might include project reports or presentations. These are the high-stakes, prestige genres.

      Before turning to a discussion of genre knowledge and how such knowledge is developed, I will briefly outline relevant models of expertise. Theories of expertise are useful at this juncture because they offer a framework for understanding what it means to be an expert writer in a specific domain and how novices might develop such expertise.

      Expertise

      Theories of expertise have been situated mainly, though not exclusively, within the field of cognitive psychology. Notable theorists Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia define expertise as “effortfully acquired abilities . . . that carry us beyond what nature has specifically prepared us to do” (1993, p. 3). They claim that experts are better problem solvers in their own local domains because they are able to draw on knowledge that allows them to think less than non-experts. Outside of their domains of expertise, however, experts work harder and appear to work toward extending their knowledge instead of utilizing the knowledge they already possess. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) describe how experts continually reinvest their mental resources, allowing them to address problems at increasingly higher levels. Useful to an understanding of writer expertise in particular are Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1987) models of knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming. Knowledge-telling is a model of text composing generally adopted by inexperienced writers who utilize only the topic, genre constraints, and text as sources of knowledge. These sources provide novices with strategies for composing without additional support, using readily available knowledge and discourse production skills that they already possess. Expert writers, according to Bereiter and Scardamalia, go beyond knowledge-telling to rework or transform their knowledge. In this knowledge-transforming model, writers actively transform their ideas as they move between developing knowledge and developing text.

      This two-way interaction between content and rhetoric is termed the “dual problem space” by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). It is this space that Geisler (1994) further explores in her model of expertise. In Geisler’s model, abstractions play a key role; it is in the domain-content space where experts develop abstractions that lead them to go beyond lay knowledge, and it is in the rhetorical-process space where experts “develop the reasoning structures that enable them to bring those abstractions to bear upon the contexts in which they work” (Geisler, 1994, p. 84). Geisler suggests that it is the shifting between these two spaces that leads experts to go beyond knowledge-telling and into knowledge-transforming. Applied to disciplinary writing, this model would suggest that experts build disciplinary knowledge and develop discursive and rhetorical skills simultaneously, with each process interacting and building upon one another.

      Geisler goes on to outline an acquisition process of expertise that encompasses three distinct periods. In the first period, writers engage in knowledge-telling, viewing texts as autonomous. In this stage, the rhetorical domain is generally collapsed within the content domain. In the intermediate stage, writers begin to work increasingly with abstractions through tacitly acquired knowledge, yet they continue to hold relatively naïve representations of the rhetorical space. In the final stage, writers are able to reorganize and abstract the rhetorical-problem space as distinct from the domain-content space; that is, they begin to view texts as having authors, claims, credibility, and temporality. At this stage, writers work with abstractions in both the rhetorical-problem space and domain-content space, engaging in the “dynamic interplay that produces expertise” (1994, p. 87). This importance of the rhetorical-problem space is echoed in ethnographic research by Smart (2000) in which workplace writers engaged in domain-specific writing simultaneously developed an “increased awareness of the rhetorical situation and textual conventions associated with the genre” (p. 240).

      An alternative pluralistic theory of expertise is offered by Carter (1990), who views performance-guiding knowledge as a continuum from general knowledge to highly contextualized local knowledge. This theory describes

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