A Genre Analysis Approach in Teaching Marine Electrical Engineers Texts

Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen

Genre definitions by Swales (1990) and Miller (1984) include the communicative purpose of a text as an indicative feature of its genre. Genre studies have also identified how expert members of discourse communities possess professional expertise in genre styles. This article shows that beyond discourse community expert members, ordinary audiences also have conceptions of genre and use those conceptions to evaluate texts. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of listener reviews of the true crime-comedy podcast My Favorite Murder, the analysis shows that negative reviews view the true crime-comedy categorisation as two separate genres, evaluating the podcast based on expectations of true crime and expectations of comedy. Positive reviewers accept the true crime-comedy genre as a new, mixed genre and evaluate the podcast from an in-group perspective, identifying themselves as members of the My Favorite Murder discourse community. Through this analysis, I show that audiences implement some form of genre analysis in text evaluations and that membership of the discourse community influences how they apply genre expectations to evaluations of texts.

<i>Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism</i>. Edited by Garin Dowd , Lesley Stevenson , and Jeremy Strong . Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2006. Pp. 178.

Speech Genres in Cultural Practice

Rethinking Genre Theory Film Genre: and Beyond, by Barry Langford, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Barry Langford correctly contends that while has become an increasingly contested concept in scholarship, the film continues to dominate much of Hollywood's annual output. To add to his point, at the time of this review, the top-grossing films in the United States include two horror films, a sports film, an action/adventure film, a historical drama, two teen films- one a musical and another a college comedy-and, finally, an animated children's film. While genre theory has traditionally focused on the formation of such Classical categories as the Western, the gangster, the romantic comedy, the horror, and the combat film, the need for a redefined understanding of genre-one which accounts for the post-Classical emergence of the notoriously difficult to define science-fiction and blockbuster action that make up the bulk of multiplex fare every summer- is more necessary than ever. Langford's Film Genre successfully addresses this growing need by working through the question of how the academic and industrial concept of genre emerges, and convincingly promoting an evolutionary model that focuses on genre formation as a process rather than as constant and internally consistent. Instead of decrying the post-Classical impulse toward genre blending and bending as a threat to traditional notions of genre theory, Langford effectively demonstrates that these impulses have been a key feature of genre since the beginning of narrative film. Langford carefully balances his critique of the constantly evolving generic categories between two audiences. On one hand, he pitches his discussion toward students who might be coming to an understanding of genre for the first time, and on the other, he successfully navigates the various and sometimes competing assertions of genre scholars. More specifically, Film Genre extends and revises the expert's sense of genre by pointing to the prescient need to reformulate rigid conceptions of genre films as being only systematic, routinized, and internally consistent productions intended for mass audiences. Langford divides his book into three major sections. First, he traces the emergence of four Classical genres-the Western, the musical, the war/combat film, and the gangster film-and provides significant examples of how scholarship and the industry have shaped the ways in which audiences have come to understand the key signifiers of each. The second section focuses on what he refers to as transition genres of the horror and science-fiction film, clarifying how each contributes to the destabilization of the categories described in the first section. Finally, the third section explores contemporary post-Classical genres like noir, the action blockbuster, and other complex forms like documentary, the Holocaust film, and pornography in order to demonstrate how the mutability of generic form has been a constant and consistent feature of narrative film. Each chapter, moreover, includes a discussion that goes beyond Hollywood to explore how other national cinemas have treated the specific genres under consideration. Lastly, each chapter provides a case-study of a specific analyzed within the matrix of scholarly approaches employed by the author throughout the book, which makes Film Genre especially useful for students. Langford's approach to Film Genre allows him to successfully achieve the important goals of extending the pioneering work of genre theorists like Thomas Schatz, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, and providing an accessible explanation of Hollywood's historical relationship with the genre film. Langford's flexible definition of genre depends heavily on reinvestigating the significance of melodrama to narrative film. Identifying what he refers to as the melodramatic modalities of genres, Langford's theory helps to clarify why genre films often fail to fully satisfy the rules of their form. …

Was this analysis helpful? A genre analysis of the Amazon.com discourse community and its “most helpful” product reviews

This entry discusses the contributions of John M. Swales to applied linguistics in the areas of English for Specific Purposes and genre analysis. Swales's early work on the organization of research article's introductions in terms of rhetorical moves and later descriptions of a variety of academic genres in different languages and disciplines is also discussed. Swales's advancement of the concepts of genre, communicative purpose, rhetorical move, and discourse community within studies of academic writing are also considered. This entry also provides an overview of the analytical methods used by Swales in his descriptions of academic discourses, ranging from textography to qualitatively enhanced corpus analysis. An overview of Swales' extensive contributions to EAP education in terms of materials development, ESP course development, and discussions of important aspects of the ELT field is also provided in this entry.

This action research study investigates how genre theory can be integrated into the practice of a writing enrichment program and how the frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Analysis can help assess and improve both student learning and teacher practice. A multilayered exploration of teacher-student discourse in an urban public elementary school in the Midwest United States discloses the various ways in which the concept of genre is both successfully and unsuccessfully constructed among fourth-grade students. Grounded in sociocultural and genre theory, I define and develop a three-way understanding of the word genre: genre as a literary term; genre referring to the analytical tool used in CDA as developed by Fairclough; and Genre, referring to pedagogical theories which suggest that social purpose is at the heart of all text making and must be considered and made explicit when teaching about genre.

This thesis analyses issues concerning genre, vision and visual representation in reports and published journals of nineteenth century Australian inland exploration. The methodology draws on work in genre theory, semiotics and cognitive science and develops valuable aspects of the work of E. H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion (1960) and Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) while critically evaluating it. Particularly important is the stress of both on the importance of patterns of thinking (or conceptual schemas) along with pictorial schemas in picture production. Here there are parallels with genre theory. Using the concept of genre as a primary analytical tool, the thesis demonstrates that generic expectations and requirements on the part of both explorers and exploration artists and their audience are important in determining the form, content and evaluation of visual material in exploration journals and reports. Especially significant is the requirement for pleasurable instruction deriving from Horace, that was prevalent in eighteenth century travel literature. As critical reviews attest, this continued to be an important generic criterion in nineteenth century travel writing, including exploration journals.By examining the visual representations in exploration journals and reports produced between 1820 and 1897, differing responses to the demand for information and pleasure are demonstrated. These responses are shown to be influenced by technological developments such as new printing techniques, increasing specialisation and professionalisation in both science and art, and changes in the nature of the audience for exploration writing and art. Thomas Mitchell is a major figure in this analysis because of his noteworthy success in combining appropriate information and pleasure, especially in his first journal of exploration published in 1838. His achievement is analysed in relation to his predecessors, Oxley and Sturt, and successors such as Grey, Eyre, Leichhardt and Becker. The complexities of generic change in the second half of the century are demonstrated by examining journals such as those by Stuart, Warburton, Forrest and Giles plus the publications of the Horn Expedition of 1894 in relation to cultural, intellectual and political developments. Of principal concern are the developing requirements of professional and popular science, the impact of evolutionary theory, the influence of the romantic adventure novel, and the late and variable uptake of photography in Australian exploration journals.Issues related to the complexities of the relationship between vision, knowledge and power in the exploration journals and reports are also examined. The importance of specific criteria in considerations of accuracy is one theme. Also of concern are variable attitudes to vision suggested by differences in reliance on visual images, the relationship of the visual and the verbal in the journals and reports, and uncertainties about vision revealed in commentary on phenomena such as mirages. Overall, this thesis offers an alternative both to the linear account of scientific triumph evident in the argumentative structure of European Vision and to the narrow reductiveness and solipsism of some recent ideological approaches to exploration art and vision. It demonstrates the importance of considering the socio-cultural, conceptual and material aspects of visual communication in exploration journals and reports, producing an enhanced understanding of the visual material included in them and the role this played in the production of knowledge and meaning.

Genre theory, as it has developed in the last forty years, has made use of what I call a constitutive concept of genre, a concept that has built into it the assumption that genre plays a central epistemic role in the interpretation of verbal discourse. In this paper I argue that there are theoretical problems with such a concept that have not been recognized and that make it unsuitable as a critical instrument in literary history and literary studies. A fruitful concept of literary genre needs to be pragmatic with only a heuristic and not an epistemic function. As an example, the article looks at the criticism produced in connection with the picaresque novel and in particular at the account given of the origin of the genre, an account that could not have been given if one had employed a constitutive concept of genre.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non‐linear, multi‐modal, web‐mediated documents. It involves a two‐dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.FindingsThe article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.Research limitations/implicationsThe suggestion for a revised genre model is not based on an extensive empirical study of various types of web sites. The observation is restricted to a limited number of commercial web sites.Originality/valueThe article proposes new insights into the concept of genre adapting traditional models of genre theory to web‐mediated texts. A revised two‐dimensional genre model incorporating media elements into the concept of genre thus takes account of the particular characteristics of the navigation and reading elements of web‐mediated genres.

Systemic Functional Linguistics is a linguistics approach which cop-siders not only the structure of the language but also its social context. In the Systemic Functional Linguistics the concept of genre is defined as a step-by-step activity to reach the goal. The concept of genre is used to describe the cultural context in a language. According to this view, text should be seen and observed in its interaction with the context and social background. For that, the genre analysis will constantly involve the linguistic social context in the forms of field, tenor, mode, schematic structure and its realization in the text.

Academic attention to educational podcasts has grown significantly in recent years. However, to date, the concept of genres in podcasting is yet to gain scholarly attention. By examining genres emergent from a corpus of educational podcasts available online, this paper introduces the value of genre analysis to educational podcast research. It proposes three genres, named ‘The Quick Burst’, ‘The Narrative’ and ‘The Chat Show’. The three genres show both the versatility of podcasting for education and how genre analysis could introduce new ideas to the educational podcasting literature, including ideas about supporting deep learning in e-learning environments.

This paper looks at how meanings unfold across the genre of Contemporary Slovenian Sermons under the application of tools developed within the fields of systemic functional linguistics and corpus linguistics. The theoretical construct for the analysis is provided by Hasan';s (1984) concept of genre and Cloran';s (1994) concept of message semantics. To determine consistency of textual patterns for the genre of sermons, lexico-grammatical patterns in sermons are examined. It is argued that genre analysis, supported by visual presentation of lexico-grammatical patterns (as suggested by Biber et al. 1998) extracted from a grammatically annotated corpus of Slovenian sermons, provides a fuller picture of crucial properties of genre.

Genre can be defined as a pattern of communication that conforms to community norms. Genres are not fixed, but are constantly evolving and emerging. Examples of familiar genres range from speech utterances to publications, from text messages to databases, from blogs to formal reports. Genre studies are a multi-disciplinary area, which has the potential to yield much of relevance to the archival community. With these words, we introduced our call for the papers for this special issue of Archival Science. We were cautiously optimistic that authors would come forward with interesting and insightful papers on various aspects of genre and archives. We received a tremendous response, with a large number of very promising proposals. The seven papers that subsequently made it through the reviewing process into this special issue represent the highest quality submissions, but by no means the totality of research activity in archival science with a focus on genre. The concept of genre is not one that has figured prominently in either archival discourse or practice to date. It has been suggested that there is a potential for it to be relevant in archival description and appraisal (Oliver et al. 2008), but it has attracted much more interest in related disciplines—particularly the information retrieval/information seeking behaviour research communities (see Anderson 2008 for an in depth literature review of genre in information studies). Consequently, if asked about genre, an archivist may think of those ill-conceived lists of document types, which become longer and longer as yet another ambiguous ‘type’ is added. Or, he or she may think of genre as a blunt instrument used in libraries to organise the fiction collection into broad groupings such as romance, mysteries and