Building Genre Knowledge. Christine Tardy

      Figure 1. Integration of genre knowledge.

      When first approaching the task of writing a job application letter, for example, the writers I followed tended to think of form and content as distinct from issues of the rhetorical context or procedures. They asked themselves questions like what is the proper form? or what do readers expect to find in this letter? But they did not ask what I might call more “integrated” questions like how might I modify the organization of my letter for this particular employer?—at least not in their first encounters, which took place within a classroom environment.

      In early genre encounters, writers are faced with the demands of attending to multiple generic issues, and the cognitive load becomes heavier as multiple layers of requisite knowledge are added to picture, such as linguistic elements or the composing process. Furthermore, general distinctions between first and second language writing would suggest that these demands are even more complex for second language writers. But as writers re-encounter the same genre, certain dimensions of genre knowledge eventually become more or less “second nature,” so that the writer no longer needs to attend explicitly to those features (Jolliffe & Brier, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). This process reflects very closely that of cognitive theories of language learning relating to processing and automaticity (see, for example, Segalowitz, 2003). As McLaughlin (1990) describes it, when a complex task is first approached, people attend to various features of the task; with a great deal of practice, the component skills become automatic.

      With practice, boundaries between the components, or dimensions (as in Figure 1), become fuzzier. Writers integrate some dimensions but still focus on other individual elements in isolation. The extent of overlap or discreteness among dimensions depends on the situational context and task to which the writers are responding. Additionally, writers may find themselves foregrounding or backgrounding different knowledge dimensions when responding to different tasks (Prior, 1998; Tardy, 2003). In a writing classroom, for example, writers may be more apt to focus predominantly on form; on the other hand, in a disciplinary exam such as a doctoral preliminary paper, they may focus on subject-matter content. This tendency may provide some insight into the issue of whether or not different dimensions are better developed in different domains (Freedman, 1993a, 1993b; Freedman, Adam, & Smart 1994). As I’ll illustrate in later chapters, the writers in my research were able to develop some rhetorical knowledge in the writing classroom, but their primary focus in that setting tended to be on form. In their disciplinary courses, on the other hand, the writers often attended more to subject-matter and rhetorical dimensions than to formal dimensions.

      Genre knowledge development, like all writing development or language development, more broadly, does not occur in simple linear fashion. Rather, learners seem to go through a process of restructuring, so that new knowledge results in qualitative changes to the internal organization of knowledge, rather than simply in the addition of new structural knowledge. In McLaughlin’s (1990) words:

      Restructuring can be seen as a process in which the components of a task are coordinated, integrated, or reorganized into new units, thereby allowing the procedure involving old components to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving new components. (p. 118)

      In other words, writers do not accumulate new knowledge as something like an expanding bulleted list; rather, every new “bit” of knowledge becomes integrated with existing knowledge, resulting in a fundamental change to the learners’ larger understanding.

      As the writers described in this book became more expert genre users, they spoke of texts and textual practices in a way that considered form, rhetoric, procedure, and subject matter as inseparable. In doing so, their previous understanding of dimensions like form was revised. For instance, as one writer spoke of his attempts to organize a conference paper, he drew simultaneously on his understanding of process, form, rhetoric, and subject matter. In analyzing data from this writing task, I found these categories of knowledge to be of little use as they no longer captured the delicate shades of genre knowledge that the writer held at that point. While other genre knowledge theories (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 1999; Jolliffe & Brier, 1988; Paltridge, 1997; Swales, 1990) do consider multidimensionality, they lack an explicit explanation of development. There is an implication in such theories that writers either hold knowledge of particular dimensions or they do not (cf. Beaufort, 1999); instead, it seems to me that writers can feasibly hold all of the requisite knowledge of a genre, yet fail to synthesize this knowledge in actual practice. In contrast then to a view of genre knowledge as simply made up various dimensions, a model that can account for increased integration of those dimensions offers a more flexible and dynamic picture of writers’ knowledge over time.

      How then do multilingual writers move from relatively fragmented nascent knowledge toward more integrated expertise? This is the main question that I hope to answer through the stories of the writers in this book, and in exploring this question, I move into the social nature of language and knowledge development. Much work on writing and genre development has foregrounded the extent to which writers learn through mentoring and social support, through what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger term legitimate peripheral participation, or LPP. However, as the case studies in this book illustrate, LPP is not always available to writers—and even when it is, it does not always play a primary role in development. Rather, writers draw on a broad range of strategies and resources as they encounter genres in new contexts and tasks. The book is organized around the sociorhetorical contexts and tasks of writing that the four learners in my research engaged in as graduate students and researchers; this organization allows for a glimpse into the ways in which contexts and tasks both afford and constrain opportunities for genre learning for individuals as they move among overlapping domains of practice.

      In chapter 2, I introduce the research context, the four writers, and the social and individual histories that they brought to their graduate studies. Chapters 3 and 4 move to the domain of the writing classroom, illustrating how the writers built genre knowledge in the classroom as they wrote job application cover letters and disciplinary texts as classroom assignments. These chapters trace links between classroom activities, teacher feedback, textual exposure, and the writers’ evolving understanding of specific genres, even as they engaged in these genres outside of the classroom. Chapter 5 brings together a range of learning contexts, tracing the writers’ practices with and knowledge of the multimodal genre of presentation slides. Exploring the writers’ histories and current uses of this genre in classroom and research settings, the chapter illustrates how accumulated exposure and practice can build increasingly sophisticated