In an effort to account for the complexity of communicative purpose, Askehave and Swales suggest that researchers begin with a provisional identification of genre purpose and then “repurpose” the genre after more “extensive text-in-context inquiry” (208). For example, in his recent study of research genres, Swales examines the use of humor in dissertation defenses, arguing that the use of humor enables the achievement of the more serious purposes of the dissertation defense: The purpose and use of humor helps to “lubricate the wheels of the genre” and enables the participants in the defense to proceed “in an informal atmosphere of solidarity and cooperation” (Swales, Research Genres 170). More recently, Sunny Hyon has examined the multi-functionality of communicative purposes in university retention-promotion-tenure (RPT) reports. Analyzing how report writers use playfulness and inventiveness in RPT reports, Hyon suggests that while not overturning the reports’ official communicative purposes, “the inventiveness . . . may add unofficial purposes to these reports” (“Convention and Inventiveness in an Occluded Academic Genre” 178). Likewise, Ken Hyland has recently analyzed the strategies that academic writers use in different academic communities to construct themselves and their readers. Focusing on “stance” and “engagement,” Hyland examines how writers insert their personality into their texts through the use of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers, and how they construct their readers through the use of questions, reader pronouns, and directives (Hyland, “Stance and Engagement”). Hyland’s research demonstrates that, within the conventions of disciplinary discourses, individual writers can “manipulate the options available to them for creative and rhetorical purposes of their own” (Johns et al., “Crossing the Boundaries” 238).
In recognizing the complexity of communicative purpose and broadening the range of analysis to include “sets of communicative purposes,” recent ESP approaches to genre study acknowledge the dynamic, interactive nature of genres. In addition to analyzing occluded genres that function behind the scenes of more dominant genres, ESP genre researchers have begun also to attend to what Swales calls “genre chains,” whereby “one genre is a necessary antecedent for another” (Swales, Research Genres 18). Attending to networks of genres reveals that genre competence involves knowledge not only of individual genres, but also of how genres interact with one another in complex ways to achieve dynamic purposes. Bronia P.C. So has explored the implications of this complex set of relations for ESP genre pedagogy, concluding that: “To enable students to cope with a wide range of genres in today’s world, it is important to help them acquire not only the knowledge of the rhetorical context, audience, generic conventions, as well as overlaps and distinctions, but more importantly also the knowledge and understanding of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in genre writing” (77).
To examine genre intertextuality, some ESP researchers have emphasized ethnographic approaches to genre study. Ann Johns, for example, has promoted the idea of students as both genre researchers and genre theorists to help bridge the gap between what genre researchers know about genres (as complex, dynamic entities) and what student are often taught about genres (as static, fixed forms) in literacy classrooms (Johns, “Destabilizing and Enriching” 237-40; see also Johns, “Teaching Classroom and Authentic Genres”). In Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies, Johns invites students to become ethnographers of the academic contexts in which they are learning to write, including the values and expectations underlying the genres they are asked to write and what role these genres play in their academic contexts. In “Destabilizing and Enriching Novice Students’ Genre Theories,” Johns shifts the analysis to students’ own theories of genre in the context of a “remedial” EAP course, inviting students to reflect on the (often limited and limiting) theories of genre they bring with them and encouraging them “to broaden their concepts of genre and their genre repertoire” at the same time as they acquire new academic genres (244). This more auto-ethnographic approach enables students to become more “aware of the interaction between process, intertextuality, and products, and the variation among texts even within what is assumed to be a single pedagogical genre such as the research paper or five-paragraph essay” (246).
Brian Paltridge has recently described the use of ethnography in a writing course for second language graduate students at the University of Sydney, in which students interview their professors in order to find out why they want students to write in certain genres and what purposes these genres serve within the discipline. In so doing, students can deploy their “thicker” understanding of genres within their disciplinary setting in order to “negotiate the boundaries, values, and expectations of the disciplines in which they are writing” (Johns et al., “Crossing the Boundaries” 236). Such ethnographic approaches in ESP genre teaching signal a recognition among ESP genre researchers of the deeply social nature of genres, not only in the sense that genres are embedded in social contexts such as discourse communities, but also in the sense that genres help shape social contexts—a view of genre acknowledged by Ken Hyland when he writes: “It is through this recurrent use of conventional forms and communicative practices that individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done. Genres therefore not only embed social realities but also construct them” (Johns et al, “Crossing the Boundaries” 237). As Swales puts it is in his “textographic” study of a university building (1998), genres help connect “lifeways” and “textways” (Other Floors).11
Despite recent attempts to bring a more dynamic, complex understanding of genre into ESP classrooms, ESP genre approaches have been subject to critique by scholars who contend that such approaches are often subject to a pedagogy of accommodation, prescriptiveness, and genre competence rather than genre performance. To counterbalance these motivations, some ESP scholars have called for a more critical approach to genre study and teaching within ESP.
ESP and Critical Approaches to Genre
Sarah Benesch was one of the first EAP scholars to point out the ideological consequences of giving non-native English speaking students access to academic and professional discourse communities through explicit teaching of genre conventions (see Critical English and “ESL, Ideology, and the Politics of Pragmatism”).12 By ignoring the ideological implications of such a pedagogy of accommodation, Benesch argues, EAP teachers unwittingly reproduce the very academic cultures of power that exclude non-native speaking students in the first place. As such, “EAP’s accommodation to traditional academic practices” may actually “limit the participation of nonnative-speaking students in academic culture” (Benesch, “ESL, Ideology, and the Politics of Pragmatism” 713). Benesch has not been alone in questioning the implications of what Pennycook has called ESP’s “vulgar pragmatism.” As noted in Belcher, Peter Master has called on ESP to be more self-reflective about its role both in spreading global English and in helping language learners meet the needs of institutions and workplaces without questioning what and whose interests these needs represent (Master 724). Likewise, Alan Luke explains that a “a salient criticism of the ‘genre model’ is that its emphasis on the direct transmission of text types does not necessarily lead on to a critical appraisal of that disciplinary corpus, its field or its related institutions, but rather may lend itself to an uncritical reproduction of discipline” (314).
Such critiques do not reject an accomodationist approach entirely, but call instead for what Pennycook calls a “critical pragmatism,” one that still aims to provide non-native speakers of English with access to genres of power and opportunity but that does so more critically. The difference between Pennycook’s “vulgar” and “critical” pragmatism hinges on what ESP researchers and teachers mean by “explicit” analysis and teaching of genres. The kind of explicit analysis and teaching called for by critical pragmatism would go beyond explicating genre patterns and features to include an analysis of the ideologies, identities, and power relations embedded in and reproduced by these patterns and features. As Brian Paltridge explains, a critical perspective on genre “might explore the connections between discourse, language learning, language use, and the social and political contexts” while providing “students with the tools they need to succeed” (Genre and the Language Learning Classroom 121). Such an approach argues that effective participation within a discourse community requires more than just the ability to follow genre conventions as these relate to communicative purposes; it requires the ability