Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by experts

Abstract

The term genre has been interpreted in a variety of ways by experts from a number of traditions. Hyon, in her 1996 TESOL Quarterly article, separated genre theorists and practitioners into three camps: the Sydney School, based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics work of Halliday (1985), which has developed research and well-established pedagogies at a number of academic levels (see e.g., Christie, 1991; Feez, 2002); the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) camp, whose most famous exponent, John Swales, is internationally-recognized for Genre Analysis (1990) and ‘‘moves’’ in research article introductions; and The New Rhetoric (NR) group, principally North Americans, for whom genre knowledge has been considered to be primarily social, embedded in the community and context of writer and audience (See e.g., Freedman & Medway, 1994). In a simpler taxonomy, Flowerdew (2002) dichotomized genre theorists into linguistic and non-linguistic camps, claiming that