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Date Posted: 04:37:17 07/18/03 Fri
Author: Aparecida dos Santos Silva
Subject: TASK 11

UFMG 2003-07-16

COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
Teacher: Vera Menezes
Student: Aparecida dos Santos Silva

Explain what a genre-based approach is

Maria Aparecia Gazotti says in her interview on “New Routes in ELT” that the expression “genre” provoked a strange reaction on her. I had the same feeling trying to discover what it really meant. Reading her comments and the other texts it became clear to me.

She also mentions Bakhtin theory: “This author says that as human beings interact in different social contexts, they create rules to be followed within these contexts. These rules are not only related to the social behaviour but also to the linguistic choices people make when producing the language in scpecific contexts for specific reasons.”

So genre serves specific purposes and it can be identifed by examining the structural organization of a text as well as the linguistic features within it.

For example a recipe contains a specific vocabulary and procedures that itentifies it as a recipe , a handbook , game instructions, a poem, a newspaper ad, and many other things that make part of our lives have specific codes.

Sometimes reading is not enough to understand these codes. If I have a handbook but I do not have the equipment to see how each part is explained, I will not figure it out. A person who can’t cook will have trouble performing a recipe. So if “genre” is difficult to understand in our own language imagine as a second or foreign language.

According to Gazzotti, the concept is not new at all, because teachers teach students how to produce business letter, letters of complaint, invitations, the problem is when they adapt the structure of the language and change the linguist characteristic of a genre.

The best way of doing it is to analyze the text and introduce the subject in a context.
There are lots of experiences being carried out in Autralia, England and Geneva in their mother tongue. In Geneve the texts were separated by similar characteristics in order to make it easier . The chosen groups were related to reporting experiences and facts , such as: diaries, news, biogrphies and facts.

Concerning the feasibility in this approach to ELT Gazotti says that we have to adapt some things but we would have to consider not only the genre we would like to teach but also on the skills we are aiming at teaching.

Reference:

GAZZOTTI, M.A. Genres an Alternative to ELT. New Routes, March 1999.p.14-18 and In Didatic Material for EFL p.18-19.

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