Building Genre Knowledge

By Christine Tardy

Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, BUILDING GENRE KNOWLEDGE provides a unique look into the processes of building genre knowledge while offering a dynamic theory of those processes that is inclusive of both monolingual and multilingual writers—a necessary move in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms. It will therefore be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in both first and second language writing studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jul 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781602355156

Christine Tardy

Christine M. Tardy is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She has taught English as a second or foreign language in the U.S., Czech Republic, Japan, and Turkey. She has published extensively in the areas of genre and discourse studies, second language writing, and academic writing instruction.

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Acknowledgments

As with any work of this length, I owe a great debt of gratitude to many. First and foremost, I thank the four writers who allowed me to intrude into their graduate studies and put their words under a microscope. I also thank the writing instructor for allowing me to sit in her class and talk with her students about that class. Their willingness to allow me to observe them, audio-record them, and analyze their writing and their words is a remarkable display of trust. Without these individuals, this project simply could not have come to fruition. I sincerely hope that I have not represented any of them or their experiences in a way that they would find misleading.

I owe thanks as well to the many people who have influenced my understanding of genre and writing through their work. Their voices run throughout this book and continue to challenge and motivate me. On a more personal level, I am grateful to Margie Berns, Graham Smart, and Irwin Weiser for their comments and help on the research that led to this monograph. Many thanks also to John Swales, whose work first sparked my interest in genre many years ago and who has been remarkably supportive of me from my days as an undergraduate to the present. And I owe special thanks to Tony Silva, who has taught me much more about research and second language writing than he knows. His careful and cutting-edge work has inspired me as a researcher, and his encouraging words and calm demeanor helped me keep my sanity while swimming in binders and files of data.

I am also very thankful for the support I’ve received at DePaul University, especially from my department chairs Bill Fahrenbach and Peter Vandenberg, and my past and present colleagues in rhetoric and composition (Pete, Darsie, David, Roger, Heather, Julie, Melinda, Matthew, Shaun, René, and Tony), who have indulged my attempts to bridge disciplinary divides. DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences also provided helpful support through a summer research grant. At Parlor Press, I am grateful to David Blakesley, who provided very helpful guidance and support along the way, and to Paul Kei Matsuda for his belief in this work from its earlier stages and his always helpful conversations in moving forward to this stage. I am also indebted to Anis Bawarshi for his thorough read and insightful suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. Any remaining faults in this work are mine alone. Finally, I thank Matthew for putting up with the endless anti-social evenings that have gone into this project and for engaging my obsession with seeing the world through genre.

1 Genre and Genre Knowledge

Linguistic diversity in higher education is on the rise. According to the Institute of International Education (2008), the number of international students in U.S. universities has jumped from about 34,000 in 1954 to just over 580,000 in 2007. Similarly, the international student population has continued to grow in the United Kingdom, with over 330,000 international students in the United Kingdom in 2005, making up 13% of the total student population in higher education (UK Council for International Student Affairs, 2008). In both countries, the international student enrollment is slightly higher at the graduate level than the undergraduate level, with the majority of international students studying in the fields of engineering, business and management, and physical and life sciences. Indeed, in the U.S. it is not uncommon for engineering graduate programs at research universities to enroll more international students than domestic students. In both the U.S. and the U.K., the majority of these students are multilingual English speakers, who have already completed many years of English language study.

Of course, international students are not the only multilingual students on campus. U.S. postsecondary institutions, for example, are serving a growing number of foreign-born U.S. residents as a result of an increase in immigration in recent decades. Some of these students may have moved to the U.S. as babies or young children, but many arrived in middle school or secondary school. These students, often referred to as Generation 1.5 (not traditional first generation or traditional second generation), were usually given very limited ESL instruction in school and were instead quickly mainstreamed into monolingual classrooms. Although English may be these students’ dominant language, they often continue to face linguistic challenges in academic literacy, due to the limited support they have received in English language learning and in literacy development in their first language. Unfortunately, gathering data regarding this student population is rare at most universities, so their numbers, languages spoken, and fields of study are largely unknown.

The challenges of English-language academic literacy are also not limited to multilingual students in the contexts of English-dominant countries. As academic research and the global economy have increasingly adopted English as a common language, learners around the world have been forced to develop advanced English language skills, including students at English-medium universities worldwide, international scholars and researchers who have never studied outside of their home countries, and countless professionals around the globe in business, science, and other fields. With the post-World War II explosion in science and technology, access to and management of information has become vital to international scholarship, and English has, in many cases, become a common language of scholarship. Journal databases like the Science Citation Index (SCI), for example, illustrate a growing dominance of English-language publications, with English making up 95% of SCI publications in 1995; the remaining percentage was made up of French, German, Russian, and—at about 0.5 to 0.7%—all other languages (van Leeuwen, Moed, Visser, & van Raan, 2001). Now, even beyond the hard sciences, journals wishing to establish or maintain an international reputation must publish in English, putting great pressure on scholars to write in English. This preference for English-language publication trickles down to undergraduate education, where students in many countries rely on English-language textbooks or even attend English-medium universities. Overall, it is estimated that multilingual users of English will greatly outnumber native English speakers within the next few decades (Graddol, 1997), if they have not already.

This linguistic landscape is characterized by inequity. While native English speakers may take language for granted in their scholarly endeavors, numerous students around the world spend years studying English and face the challenges of academic reading, writing, and networking in a second or additional language—part of this challenge includes learning the valued genres of academic communication. Undergraduate students, for example, may need to write essays, research papers, lab reports, response papers, and project reports; graduate students engage in genres that bridge academic and professional participation, such as journal articles, conference papers, and grant proposals. Learning such genres goes beyond the learning of form. Students must learn the discursive practices of their discipline, including the preferred ways of constructing and distributing knowledge, the shared content knowledge, and the intertextual links that build and reference such knowledge (Kamberelis, 1995); they must also develop a knowledge of the labels given to commonly used genres, the communicative purposes of different genres, the sociocultural context in which genres operate, the formal text features associated with genres, and the cultural values embedded in genres (Johns, 1997). Individual success in this process is influenced by many individual, social, political, cultural, and linguistic factors—all of which may make the learning of disciplinarity (and thus disciplinary genres) more time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating. Factors like language proficiency, prior (perhaps conflicting) genre experiences, and the sociopolitical networks that learners are (or are not) a part of are all relevant to genre learning—and may pose barriers for linguistically diverse students. The question of how to facilitate the learning of disciplinary genres for these students has, as a result, gathered much attention by both researchers and teachers, especially within the context of higher education.

This book explores the challenges of disciplinary writing development, offering a framework for understanding how knowledge of disciplinary genres is developed over time in various settings. Specifically, the book follows the paths of four multilingual graduate students through their participation in an ESL writing course, disciplinary content courses, and disciplinary research. It describes the contexts in which the students wrote during different stages of their graduate study and the knowledge of different genres that they built over time. I focus on the genre learning of multilingual writers because these writers are increasingly the typical writer in a mobile world that often uses English as an academic lingua franca, and also because I believe that these writers’ experiences have much to tell us about the complexities of genre learning. Although my research is situated within the context of international graduate student learning at a U.S. university, I believe the issues examined here are relevant to a range of populations, monolingual and multilingual, in English-dominant countries and contexts in which English is a second or additional language.

In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for the subsequent chapters, outlining the debate over genre and writing pedagogy; defining the important constructs of practice, task, discourse, and genre; introducing the crucial importance of genre networks; and presenting relevant models of expertise. Building on these theoretical foundations, I present a theory of genre knowledge and a descriptive model for developing this knowledge as a multilingual writer. This model will be illustrated through the stories of four such writers in the remainder of the book and elaborated in the final chapter.

Genre and Writing Instruction

The research in this book grows out of the questions that I’ve returned to repeatedly as a teacher of writing: What writing tasks should I include in my courses? To what extent can and should I teach discipline-specific writing? What will the writers actually take away from my course, if anything? Whether my classroom was in the workplace in Asia or at universities in the United States and the Middle East, I have found the notion of genre to be useful in understanding the written communication that learners hope to master. While my workplace students needed to write within the four memo formats carefully prescribed by their multinational company, the graduate students that I have taught have had far more diverse and less predictable needs: article reviews, collaborative term projects, lab reports, proposals, conference papers, master’s theses, dissertations, and journal articles, to name only a few. In both cases, viewing these texts as genres—that is, typified responses to repeated situational exigencies—seemed to provide both me and my students with a useful heuristic for increasing their understanding of these writing demands.

Genre is of course not a new concept in writing instruction, where genre-based teaching has been both championed and critiqued for nearly two decades. Genre-centered approaches rely on the belief that an awareness of texts’ forms, functions, and social contexts will facilitate learners’ development of writing expertise (Hyland, 2003). In U.S. first-year composition instruction, genre has become a popular organizing principle for textbooks and course syllabi in which students examine and write texts like letters, reviews, profiles, and research papers. In many of these instances, genre has become merely a substitute for discourse modes and is presented as a fairly static and a-rhetorical text type. But approaches that could more aptly be called genre-based have been outlined by Bawarshi (2003) and Devitt (2004), who advocate the critical analysis of genres in the classroom. Textbooks that adopt this orientation (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2003b; Jolliffe, 1999) teach writers ways to explore genres rather than teaching students to use specific genre features.

Genre-based approaches have enjoyed considerably more favor in second language classrooms. In attempting to address the needs of students who are often culturally and/or linguistically marginalized from sociorhetorical practices in educational, academic, and workplace settings, many practitioners have turned to genre as a way in to the power structures of society. The genre-based pedagogy adopted in Australia in the 1980s, for example, arose out of concerns that process pedagogy failed to serve traditionally marginalized students with its less explicit approach to writing instruction. Australian educationists like James Martin, Frances Christie, and Joan Rothery drew upon Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics to articulate a new pedagogy that aimed to make visible the underlying textual features of genres of power. Teaching these genres in K-12 and workplace instructional settings, practitioners in this so-called Sydney School see genre as a key resource for academic or workplace literacy. (See Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin, 1993a, 1993b; Martin & Rothery, 1993 for more detailed discussions of the history and curricular applications of this approach.)

While the Sydney School approach has evolved amidst the unique concerns of the Australian educational and workplace contexts, a separate approach to genre-based pedagogy has become popular among practitioners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The most extensive work in this area has been found in ESL academic writing contexts (outlined most thoroughly by Flowerdew, 1993; Johns, 1997, 2002b; Martin, 1993b; Swales, 1990; and Swales & Feak, 1994b; Swales & Feak, 2000). A hallmark of the ESP approach to genre-centered pedagogy is its emphasis on rhetorical consciousness-raising. Genre analysis (an explicit sociorhetorical analysis of genres) has become central to a pedagogy that asks students to explore the relationship between texts and their social domains (that is, between generic form and generic content). Theoretically, this pedagogical approach appears to facilitate the development of genre knowledge for writers like international graduate students, scholars, and professionals faced with high-level writing demands in a second language; nevertheless, several criticisms have been raised against genre-centered teaching.

Some critics of both the Australian and ESP models have pointed to the danger that teaching genres in the classroom can serve to reify the power structures in which they are embedded; these critics advocate a more critical approach through which academic norms are challenged rather than accepted (Benesch, 1995, 2001; Pennycook, 1997). Others problematize the emphasis that genre-centered approaches place on mastery of genres as access to power, overlooking the many other forms of capital (e.g., gender, race, and class) that may significantly preclude or enable social access (Luke, 1996, p. 329). Canagarajah’s (1996, 2003) work has also highlighted the additional non-discursive elements that can work against writers from developing countries who are disadvantaged by virtue of a system of scholarly publication largely controlled by countries like the United States and Great Britain.

Freedman (1993a, 1993b, 1999) has further argued that discursive practices such as genres are impossible to teach, given the shifting nature of the disciplinary ideologies out of which genres evolve. Related criticisms come from a belief that generic staticity is implicit in any pedagogical application—unless genres are static, why should they be, and how can they be, taught? ask Freedman and Medway (1994b, p. 9). Yet, as Swales (2004) notes, such reasoning would discount the validity of much education, particularly in fields like computer science, where knowledge changes at a particularly rapid rate. While the dangers of staticity and prescriptivism are easily recognizable by teachers (Kay & Dudley-Evans, 1998), some have pointed out that there is nothing inherently prescriptive in genre-based approaches (Hyland, 2003; Swales, 1990). Less direct criticism of genre-centered ESP or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is found in arguments against the teaching of discipline-specific writing in general, as such an approach may require an understanding of disciplinary content as well as disciplinary practices of knowledge construction and dissemination—an understanding that few ESP/EAP instructors could claim outside of their own discipline (Spack, 1988).

Related views argue that writers need to participate in a discipline in order to learn the discipline’s writing (Spack, 1988) and that genres can therefore only be acquired within the specific milieu in which they exist (Freedman, 1993a; Freedman, Adam, & Smart, 1994). These claims quite accurately emphasize the situatedness of genre learning and the very real distinctions between classroom and non-classroom writing; what they fail to account for, however, is the often fuzzy nature of the boundary between these two contexts. In many cases of ESP or EAP instruction, for example, the classroom is embedded within the larger disciplinary or professional world. Learners come to classrooms with writing tasks that they are completing in their content courses, at work, or in their independent research. They leave the writing classroom and go directly to their lab, to a study group, or even to a research conference. In a sense, the classroom is a part of the disciplinary domain in which genres are best learned; in workplace ESP, these boundaries may be even less distinguishable. Yet in both cases, there remain important differences between the classroom and non-classroom contexts, as I shall show throughout this book.

The lively debate over the role of writing instruction in the development of genre knowledge remains important for those who teach in contexts where mastery of specialized genres is one key to success. Over a decade ago, Aviva Freedman (1993a), in a well-known impeachment of explicit teaching¹ of genre in the classroom, called for empirical investigations of genre teaching. In a follow-up article, she reiterated this call unequivocally, stating: It should not be the task of the skeptics to argue against a pedagogic strategy but rather the work of the proponents to bring forward convincing research and theoretical evidence—preferably before its wholesale introduction (Freedman, 1993b, p. 279). Despite the echoing of this need for more empirical research (Hyland, 2000; Hyon, 1996; Parks, 2001; Swales, 1990, 2000), studies of genre and instruction have so far remained primarily theoretical and anecdotal. A fairly sizable number of studies have investigated how writers develop knowledge of genres and discourses through disciplinary or workplace practice, but fewer studies have looked at this development systematically within writing classrooms. Particularly lacking is research that follows the same writers as they negotiate both of these intermingling and interacting contexts (see Tardy, 2006, for a comparison of studies in various contexts).

Practice, Task, Discourse, and Genre

Before delving into the complicated task of defining genre knowledge and its development, I need to address what underlies the theory and practice of specialized writing. I see four constructs as fundamental: practice, task, discourse, and genre. In my view, these are somewhat parallel concepts, with practice and discourse describing broad levels of interaction and communication channels, while task and genre describe more specific, typified instances of the larger categories.

Taking a social view of written communication, practice may be defined as doing, where the meaning and the structure of that doing is constructed by its social and historical context (Wenger, 1998). Examples of practice include conducting research, reading, and writing. Through practice, writers interact with the artifacts and people within the given sociohistorical contexts, making meaning and building knowledge (Prior, 1998). A related concept is that of activity, such as participation in monthly laboratory meetings, collaboration on a journal article, or presentation of a conference paper. These events are defined by their sociohistorical context, their goals, and the tools and objects (e.g., genres or technology) used to carry out those goals. The term activity is associated with Vygotskyan sociocultural perspectives on learning, in which object-directed, tool-mediated interactions are referred to as activity systems (Russell, 1997). Activity has served as a powerful theoretical construct for many ethnographic studies of writers and writing contexts. However, I will limit its use throughout this book—at least in its more theoretical sense as part of activity theory—for several reasons. First, the research I share in this book is not fully ethnographic, in that I did not observe extensive social interactions in most of the writers’ contexts (with the exception of the writing classroom); it is in this careful ethnographic account of social practice that I believe activity becomes such a useful concept. Additionally, while activity theory has had much to contribute to studies of genre practice, I found myself often becoming lost in its terminological web when bringing it to the overlapping domains and communities that I follow in this book. As a result, I have turned instead to the concept of task.

As an alternative to activity, task may offer a more robust construct for studying the actual practice of individuals. Swales (1990) defines task as:

One of a set of differentiated, sequenceable goal-directed activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures relatable to the acquisition of pre-genre and genre skills appropriate to a foreseen or emerging sociorhetorical situation. (p. 74)

Though he describes task in the context of teaching methodology, I will use the term to refer to specific goal-oriented, rhetorical literacy events in both disciplinary and classroom domains—for example, writing a master’s thesis, collaborating on a conference paper, or completing a classroom assignment. Bracewell and Witte (2003) similarly propose task as an important construct for studying workplace literacy, defining it as the set of goals and actions that implement these goals, which are developed in order to achieve a solution to a complex problem within a specific work context (p. 528). While this definition shares similarities with that of activity, it is more localized in time and space and may therefore foreground individualized actions; writers engage in activities through tasks. Because the writers in my study often worked independently and because my research tended to focus more on these writers’ individual actions than on group participation, task in many cases provided a more useful metaphor for understanding their writing practice at given points in time. At the same time, I acknowledge that a focus on activity has much to offer the study of writing development; indeed, I see these theoretical approaches as complementary.

Key channels of participation in academic literacy practices and tasks include discourse and genre. In contrast to practice/task, which focus on social interaction, I use these terms to emphasize a focus on the language—oral, written, and even visual—used to mediate social interactions. On one level, discourse is the language, broadly speaking, used by particular groups and/or in particular situations. Corpus-based language analysis, for example, has illustrated that academic discourse can be characterized by certain linguistic features that distinguish it from other registers, such as conversation, news, or fiction (Biber, 1988). More recent work has studied discourse variation among academic disciplines, finding linguistic differences between disciplines like history and biology (Conrad, 2001) or, more broadly, the soft sciences and the hard sciences (Hyland, 2000). While this primarily linguistic use of the term is focused on structural patterns, discourse also encompasses the ideologies and worldviews that shape and are shaped by communication. The term disciplinary discourse, for instance, captures the meaning of thinking and talking like an engineer (or biologist, or philosopher, and so on). Discourse is, as Gee (1999) describes it, more than language; it is an identity kit. Discourses shape our perceptions of the world, including how we communicate, act, interact, and understand.

When discourses become typified—that is, when the same events are carried out repeatedly through the same practices—they may be referred to as genres. Examples of written genres include dissertations, research articles, manuscript reviews, or submission letters, and each of these may be carried out uniquely by different social groups. Dissertations, for example, differ in a range of ways across institutions, disciplines, and geopolitical contexts. Becoming an accepted member of a disciplinary community (in both its local and global manifestations) is at least partially dependent on mastery of its discourse and unique use of genres, or the preferred means for arguing and evaluating within the field (McNabb, 2001; Said, 1982). Genre theory offers one means for understanding this type of conventionalized disciplinary communication.

Since the mid-1980s, many in applied linguistics, rhetoric, and education have turned to a view of genre as social action (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Kamberelis, 1995; Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990). Miller (1984) argues that a rhetorical view of genre must center on the action that a genre carries out, rather than on its formal features or text type; it is through this social action that people create the knowledge that is necessary in reproducing the generic structure (Miller, 1994). Genre is therefore a product or byproduct of repeated, specialized practice. At the same time, genres themselves may shape activities over time, providing a structure or scaffolding for practice (Bazerman, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). More recently, Devitt (2004) has described genre as not so much a response to a recurring situation, but rather a nexus between an individual’s action and socially defined context (p. 31). This metaphor accounts for the structurated nature of genres as they act and are acted upon by individuals and in social contexts. In this thoroughly rhetorical view, learning to use genres requires much more than learning text types and forms; it requires learning the social contexts, actions, and goals that give genres their meaning.

To this point, a sizable body of research has analyzed genres with the aim of uncovering the rhetorical functions that give rise to certain discoursal features. Ken Hyland’s (2000) work, for example, has convincingly shown how features like generic move structure, citations, and hedges and boosters reflect the ideologies and epistemologies of their authoring communities. Genres that carry heavy weight in the academic world have been studied in the most depth, giving rise to rather detailed descriptions of research articles across disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic communities. In the early days, such work appeared to be motivated by an interest in uncovering teachable textual features to second language writers. More recently, this research seems to be more concerned with complicating our understanding of text types and their dynamic and social nature. In both cases, it is clear that genres act not only as channels of communication but also as barriers for novices or outsiders. Genres have a way of regulating communication among groups, and as their features become conventionalized, the values embedded in them too become assumed and often unquestioned. Given the hierarchical nature of many disciplinary communities, genres may therefore benefit the expert, who can use the genres in rhetorically effective ways, and further exclude or alienate the novice, for whom the values and conventions are more mysterious or perhaps even distasteful. This dynamic is clearly evident in academic discourse, as students struggle to play the game of academic writing, but it also exists in professional and public spheres.

Networks of Genres

While a focus on individual genres is an important step toward understanding texts—what they look like in various contexts, what ideologies and goals they index, how and why they are (re)produced—this individual focus artificially strips away much of what gives a genre its meaning. As genres are used by a social group to carry out particular social actions, they rarely—if ever—function alone; instead, they interact with layers of other genres used to accomplish other, related goals. Kamberelis (1995) depicts this fluid and interconnected nature of genres as he writes:

Any given field of practice is constituted by many related and partially overlapping genres . . . Additionally, fields of practice are themselves highly interconnected . . . Finally, individuals simultaneously belong to multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory communities of practice, often moving in and out of them quite seamlessly. With all this overlap of fields, practices, texts, and people, the forms, functions, and practices of different genres leak into one another in a kind of metonymic or interdiscursive process of social semiosis. (p. 139)

In contemporary genre theory, the move toward a more integrated orientation to genre was first proposed by Amy Devitt (1991) in her exploration of the genre sets of tax accounting. Devitt (2004) has argued that viewing genres as intertextual and dialogic allows us to see the inherent relatedness of genres within the same social group and its actions (p. 55). In other words, studying genres as sets, systems, or clusters highlights how they respond to one another in order to accomplish a group’s goals and activity.

The notion of genre network grows out of Bakhtin’s (1986) insistence that genres are intertextual by their very nature. They are born out of prior texts and retain traces of those texts. This intertextuality 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,