Abstract
Genre awareness has recently gained a lot of attention due to the recognition of the vital impact of genres in discourse comprehension and production. At the same time, the rapid development of corpus linguistics studies has caused a reconsideration of methodological issues such as the classification of texts during corpus building. This study aims to untangle commonly confusing terms such as ‘text type’, ‘genre’ and ‘register’, reviewing their use by prominent researchers. It then attempts to investigate the range of genres involved in writing tasks presented in English language teaching material. Reporting on experience from the Writing Model Answers corpus classification of texts, we explain how we identified genres based on Systemic Functional Linguistics principles. We also suggest a more student-friendly ‘naming’, which signals the basic requirements of the task. By measuring the representation of the initial text types compared to the redefined tasks, seen as genres, we show the range of genres involved in each text type category in this context. Classification of texts based on genres and appropriate ‘naming’ of these genres is shown to offer more insight on the variation among texts. We propose that its implementation in teaching material could assist second language learners in developing linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, a combination of competences that is required in language testing.
Highlights
This study describes a manual approach for identifying genres in relatively small and specialised corpora
The rapid development of corpus linguistics studies has caused a reconsideration of methodological issues such as the classification of texts during corpus building
Reporting on experience from the Writing Model Answers corpus classification of texts, we explain how we identified genres based on Systemic Functional Linguistics principles
Summary
This study describes a manual approach for identifying genres in relatively small and specialised corpora. In line with Martin (1993) and Thompson (2014), we see genre as encompassing register where the communicative purpose together with field, tenor and mode determine the overall structure of the text, what is going to be written or discussed, the way language is going to be affected by the relations between the writer/reader or the speakers, and the most appropriate text form. We see texts and task prompts written by professional writers (already proofread and presented in well-known material) as a reliable source in order to gain insight for genre identification and specify the scope of this research narrowly within the EFL context and language proficiency exams In this context, model texts usually try to simulate real-world genres and communicative purposes but there are a number of predefined restrictions on the prompts (word-limits, language use according to proficiency level, expected pragmatic awareness as affected by age and distance from naturalistic settings).
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
