Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy

      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