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Date Posted: 15:55:21 07/18/03 Fri
Author: Viviane Coelho Caldeira Ramos
Subject: 11th Task

The definition of genre can vary among cultures or people’s background. At first, genre was related to literary contexts, regarding specific types of texts such as short stories, novels, auto-biographies, etc. Nowadays, the term genre has a broader sense, meaning the different kinds of texts that serve specifical social purposes of communication. In the article “Genre: Where art thou?”, the authors present some definitions for genre:
1. “Genres are configurations of meaning that are recurrently phased together to enact social practices.” (Martin 2002)
2. “A genre exists only in the recognition and attributions of the users.” (Bazerman 1994)
3. “... Some set of communicative purposes [and] various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience.” (Swales 1990).

In Language Teaching there is the Genre Approach that uses genres to reach the communicative competence. This is done by exposing the students to authentic material of different genres, such as recipes, shopping lists, letters, emails, articles, etc. According to Gallagher, this approach “raises students' awareness of the linguistic features of a genre and thus allows them to develop literacy across a variety of genres they will encounter in any curriculum, or even in non-school environments”.

The students are , then, exposed to a specific kind of genre, so that can get familiar of its peculiarities, lexical choices, etc, so that he/she can be asked to produce material in this genre. This activity can be done with written material or oral ( ex: radio, television newspaper, etc). This shows students that language is above all a way to communicate, and, because of that is tied up with culture and social behaviour.

Bibliography:

CRANE, Cori et all. Genre: Where art thou? Tracing the Role of Genre in the Foreign Language Curriculum in http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu/Events/papers/Crane,etal.Irvine2002Paper.htm
CRITCHLEY, Michael. Adapting Genre Theory to EFL Contexts. In http://www.encounters.jp/mike/professional/publications/bevseminar.html
GALLAGHER,Chris . Writting Across Genres. In http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/00/jul/gallagher.html

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