Within the last two decades, a number of researchers have been interested in genre as a tool for developing L1 and L2 instruction. Both genre and genre-based pedagogy, however, have been conceived of in distinct ways by researchers in different scholarly traditions and in different parts of the world, making the genre literature a complicated body of scholarship to understand. The purpose of this article is to provide a map of current genre theories and teaching applications in three research areas where genre scholarship has taken significantly different paths: (a) English for specific purposes (ESP), (b) North American New Rhetoric studies, and (c) Australian systemic functional linguistics. The article compares definitions and analyses of genres within these three traditions and examines their contexts, goals, and instructional frameworks for genre-based pedagogy. The investigation reveals that ESP and Australian genre research provides ESL instructors with insights into the linguistic features of written texts as well as useful guidelines for presenting these features in classrooms. New Rhetoric scholarship, on the other hand, offers language teachers fuller perspectives on the institutional contexts around academic and professional genres and the functions genres serve within these settings.
This article discusses narrative styles of 48 African American low-income urban kindergartners. The starting point for this study was the work of Michaels (1981,1986, 1991) who found that during a classroom activity known as "sharing time," African American first-graders tended to produce narratives that did not cohere around single topics but around a series of loosely and often unclearly related episodes, a style Michaels called topic associating. This was in contrast to the Caucasian firstgraders who tended to use a topic centered style. The results of the study presented here, however, reveal that of the 48 kindergarten children, 16 told topic associating stories and 28 told topic centered stories. Although storybook and fairy tale themes and structures were present across the two narrative styles, they were found most clearly in 9 of the topic centered narratives. Results show that although the patterns that Michaels reported were indeed found with these younger, urban, African American children in an uninterrupted storytelling context, these patterns were not the dominant ones. Examples of the styles are discussed, paying particular attention to the thematic and structural characteristics in the topic associating style. Issues concerning contexts for speech and literacy in the classrooms of these and other U.S. students are discussed. In the past decade, much of the research in linguistics and language study has focused on the narrative patterns found in different communities. Researchers Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1992 meeting of the American Educational Research Association and the 1991 meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society. We thank the children, teachers, and administration of the School District of the City of Pontiac, MI, for welcoming us for longitudinal research. This research was funded in part by the Spencer Foundation in a grant to Elizabeth Sulzby, Combined Program in Education and Psychology. and to Marilyn Shatz, Developmental Psychology, both of the University of Michigan. We appreciate Professor John Swales of Linguistics for his comments on various drafts, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of Liquistics and Educarion.
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