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Date Posted: 19:34:43 07/17/03 Thu
Author: Maria Isabel Avila Martins
Subject: 11th. class - Genre approach

Genres
11 th. Class

Genre is a set of rules established by a social context and followed as a pattern when language is used in such context. Human beings socially interact in many ways and, for each context such interaction occurs, there is a genre to be followed. For example, whenever writing a business letter, an invitation or a letter of complaints, the genre will be according to what context and purpose it is needed. Genres may vary from everyday situtations to the most formal ones.
The linguistic elements in a genre will depend on the choices the speaker or writer has made. Several linguists have thought of the genre approach as an efficient way to teach first language, and furthermore, second language. In the genre approach, grammar is taught according to the specific context and purpose the language is being used. In order to teach grammar, it is necessary to label the texts first, to analyze them according to the public to be achieved, to study the purpose the producer has to create the text and, only after all that, analyze the language used.
The number of genres is proportionally related to the number of different social contexts. In other words, there are innumerable genres once there are innumerable social interactions. To make things easier for teachers, a group of linguists from Geneva separated the genres into groups of approximate characteristics of contexts, as follows:
· Reporting experiences and facts (diaries, news, biographies, etc)
· When arguing for something (debates, editorials, complaints, etc)
· Telling stories (fairy tales, science fiction, novels, etc)
· When exposing something (conferences, reviews, seminars, etc)
· Describing actions (instructions, recipes, rules, etc)

A course syllabus based on the genre approach, when teaching a second language, is different in many ways when teaching a mother tongue language. It is necessary to have adequate adaptions for a second language course. First of all, it is advisable to define which genres the teacher wants to teach and what skills he/she is aiming at: reading, writins, listening or speaking. Teachers should make a pedagogical analysis beforehand, in order to determine what genre their students need to learn. After that, it is important to let the students aware of the many social aspects that characterize the genre to be used.
A suggestion for a class plan based on such concept would follow the steps below:
· Work with the student’s background: Students are asked to create their own production on a given task, based on their knowledge, so that the teacher will be able to analyze the student’s needs in terms of what they have to learn to produce the genre required.
· Recognize the genre: Students are asked to identify and analyze the texts given in order to recognize the genre. At this point teachers are not expected to talk about linguistic choices yet. The text chosen by the teacher needs to be an authentic model in order to characterize the genre.
· Recognizing/building up the context: The teacher explains context and its related genre.
· Characterizing the genre: Students are told that there are some formats for the production of the text being studied and are instructed by the teacher that those formats are quite stable and determined by those contexts.
· Revising the initial production: Students are expected to revise their first production so that he/she can rewrite it including what has been learned in the unit.
· Evaluation: Students evaluate what they have learned by preparing a journal, or something like that, under the teacher’s guidance.


Jul.17th., 2003

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