Evaluating Genre Pedagogy - Essay Example

EVALUATING GENRE PEDAGOGY Student’s Name Professor Course Date Introduction I agree with Frances Christie argument on genre and genre theory. Moreover, like Christie am concerned about the incomplete definition about genre. Genres are not just comprehensively defined classes but groups of texts or families, which are related by uniformity. But I would add that every elemental genre leads to a family of genres or associated assemblage of genres, which differ in some way but bear a connection to one other. Elemental genres are prevailing because they characterize canonical manners of creating meaning as well as realizing important objectives, communal, social, and personal in all cultures. This is the reason they constantly shift and adapt under the weight of societal changes whereby the creativeness of individual plays a key function. I agree with Christie that genres evolve in response to changes under various writing and communicative needs. As a result, genres function as opportunities and guidelines and not as rules, which have to be followed explaining why they can be played off, played with, selectively applied, rearranged, inverted, or else put into use in numerous settings. Genres have an undoubted power, which resides in them and the most effective way of addressing it is by bringing them to awareness to construct the numerous factors of the manners meaning is made evident. Understanding a group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is thus a larger part of what assists people to make sense of texts. Arguments Genres, as indicated in arguments by Frances Christie, are not comprehensively defined classes; however, they are “families” or groups of texts, which are not related by uniformity but by uniformity. Hyland (2003) argues that curriculum activities and materials are formulated to support learners through drawing on tasks and texts directly related to the skills they require participating in the world outside the classroom effectively. According to Christie, a number of types of genre are embraced within a long text, which is true. Frow (2005) supports the view that elemental or canonical genres tend to reproduce a wide array of related genres in adult life and adolescence depending on the field and purpose of knowledge under construction by Christie. Proficient students are usually skilled in adapting and playing with different genres, and at times, these genres evolve into new variations. Others known genres are employed by these students to generate new meanings. This shows the infinite flexibility of genres to generate meaning. Christie argued that elemental or primary schooling genres are commanding because they characterize canonical manners of creating meaning and realizing important objectives, communal, social, and personal in all cultures. According to Hyland (2004), the term genre embraces numerous classroom practices and recognizes that the features of a similar group of texts depend on the social contexts in which the texts are created and used and the features form part of the writing syllabus. The genres are important in that they act as elements, which can be used and/or recombined substantially in various ways. Christie identified various elements of structure: orientation, complication, and resolution. The purpose of the orientation is to offer circumstantial information. Complication introduces into a sequence of events a problem whereas resolution shows the way action of the protagonist or of another character resolves the problem. The orientation, complication, and resolution are the defining characteristics of the genre: they are obligatory aspects. Christie also identified other stages such as abstract and evaluation, which are optional and only occur in various instances of the genre. The abstract stage announces the beginning of a narrative, mostly in a way, which encapsulates the theme or point of the story. The evaluation signals the attitude of the speaker to the event, which may in fact spread throughout the text and might take a paralinguistic form such as laughter (Frow, 2005) Christie also categorized various canonical genres of a culture, which speaks English; narratives, recounts, procedures, reports, explanations and expositions and discussions. These elemental genres are basic text types and each of them lead to a related grouping of various genres which differ in various ways however are related to each other. Hyland (2004) argues that other than narrative genres, students should have the capacity to deal with more abstract and formal genres, such as procedures, reports, arguments, and explanations they come across in other areas of their school curriculum. There are numerous genres other than the recount and narratives, as various genres are found in writing whereas others are found in speech. Nonetheless, it is true to say that people offer a wide range of explanations and their configurations differ significantly because they are dependent on the subject involved, a point supported by Martin (1999). This is in line with Hyland (2004) argument that in the classroom setting, genre approaches to writing instruction do not characterize any particular set of teaching methods, which can be followed in an exact manner in each classroom. In addition, the term genre comprises of numerous teaching practices because of the wide scope of genres. Christie has cited the category of different genres in all school years, major schools studies by Christie (2012), Christie, and Derewianka (2008). One such category is immersion, which suggests an apparent normal process of learning language, which does not have any merit. For instance, the manner young children learn their mother tongue as well as their years of scaffolding by the caregivers before attaining autonomy in their language. Scaffolding in this case refers to the provision of initial explicit knowledge as well as guided practices (Hyland 2004). This promotes principles for effective learning as well as teaching because the children usually have enough prior knowledge for enabling them to learn novel issues. According to Christie, immersion reveals the differential readiness for school learning as well as language of children who come from diverse social class backdrops. This explains the need the country has seen to expend many resources in preparing teachers to help refugees and migrants in learning language. It is true that the migrants require much assistance to master the English language so they can realize successful contribution in the Australian workforce as well as the larger society. This point to the fact that for the functions of writing and teaching, all genres should be analyzed as well as examined in terms of their language patterns, meaning, general structure, which are part of achieving the genre social purpose. As a result, the knowledge or information and its meanings should be first introduced to establish a considerable understanding of knowledge, mostly over a number of periods. This is particularly evident as learners grow and join upper classes, encountering and dealing with progressively more challenging knowledge bodies such as literature, history, science or other subjects. The projected writing genre is launched and examined just after establishment of vital understanding of the knowledge to make the genre meaningful and important. In cases where learners already know the appropriate genre, it is usually not important to go over its different aspects, because they will be recognizable and already an element for the range of learners. Through such ways, the different genres grow to be an important component of students’ process of building knowledge as they move to the upper classes. Christie also comments on Michael Rosen suggestions on spoken and written language and suggests that his observation on the two is based on some frequent misunderstanding regarding the nature of their variation. Rosen suggested that language could be taken like “dialect” when it is a register, saves for reasonably insignificant feature. He also suggested that language is different from speech because of its diverse cohesion as Halliday explained. Christie is right to suggest that the grammatical differences between writing and speech are significant and involve much more than attaining control of cohesive tools than Halliday showed. It is true that learning literacy is challenging and normally requires a number of years to attain good mastery, and this even led to the creation of the schooling institution. It is also true that non-literate or traditional societies teach their children; however, it is just educated societies, which have the teaching institutions. For people to become literate there has to be significant consideration of the nature of written language as well as its meaning, which necessitates schooling and teachers for certain duration of time. It is true that in the initial years of mastering literacy, children produce simple language compared to the things they are competent of in speech. According to Halliday, their language relapses once they struggle with the stipulations for fully understanding the writing as well as spelling systems and various features of grammar of written language. During late childhood, the grammatical organization starts to change as students encounter increasing grammar resources. This is an imperative matter, as all the data in most countries where English is spoken, such as the US, Australia and UK show that most of the children performance starts to decline roughly past late childhood and into their teenage years. Strickland and Alvermann (2004) referred this issue in the US as literacy achievement gap; it is evident in the transition to secondary years from primary years as learners endeavour to deal with the changing set of courses. There is need for significant intervention in the in-between years to shatter the unrelenting patterns of school failures. In the initial years, the attitudinal expression as well as knowledge constructed is quite simple for children as children use common sense and draw from the personal experience field and the grammar is very similar to that of speech. According to Christie, the knowledge as well as the experience that the children deal with after the transition are not based on common sense, and they go beyond the realm of lived experience into the more far-off and unfamiliar realms, a point supported by Sietel (2003). The written language patterns change more as the learners encounter the more abstract areas of abstraction, generalization, interpretation, and arguments, which are all aspects, which become progressively more important as the learners grow older. It is also true that grammatical organization of written language is very dissimilar from the one of the initial years as the written texts become dense, mostly because of the wide-ranging application of nominalization, whilst clause patterns vary from the ones of speech. Generally, the way knowledge and experience is organized and structured is different from the manner of talk (Johns 2002). Christie argues that if this were not the case, the writing systems, as well as their allied practices for expressing meaning would not have evolved. Halliday simplified the difference between writing and speech and Christie was right in pointing out that fact. Writing serves numerous purposes and does what speech cannot. This is supported by Hyland (2004) model, which moves from graphology to scaffolding to composing (from most support to most independence). Under graphology (most support), the tasks for basic writing mechanics are keyboarding, handwriting, punctuation, spelling, and layout). Scaffolding tasks comprises of contextual awareness, language familiarization, controlled composition, model analysis, and guided composition. Contextual awareness entails observations, audiovisual materials, and research. Language familiarization entails gap-fill, comparisons, and feature identification. Model analysis and manipulation entails transforming, re-ordering or combining features. Controlled composition is founded on models, i.e. parallel writing and text completion. Guided composition entails information transfer, data transfer, and medium transfer. Composing (most independent) entails composition heuristics (planning, multi-drafting, pre-writing, editing methods). Extended writing (most independence) entails creation of texts for specific real or imagined audiences (Hyland 2004) Genres are components of “frames of recognition” and direct both the institutional production, marketing as well as distribution of texts and the selection and use of the texts by the readers. This has led the principal aim of writing in modern society to be to create, accumulate, distribute, and evaluate the different bodies of knowledge or disciplines appreciated in English speaking institutions and traditions, such as history, science, literary studies, and geography among others. According to Christie, in the secondary years, learning challenges in the different school subjects or disciplines become most evident as the distinguishing discourses of the diverse subjects materialize most particularly. The construction of knowledge in mathematics, science, history, English, and other disciplines is gradually more expressed in diverse genres, diverse manners of reasoning, as well as diverse manners of dealing the “uncommonsense” knowledge, which is represented by various disciplines. Hyland (2004) provides teachers a way of analyzing diverse contexts and present the regularities of form and structure which differentiates a particular text type from another, scaffolding the learners understanding of academic texts and their capability to write them. Hyland further argued that while students are learning their field discourses’, they come to see there is no one academic literacy but a range of practices appropriate for and relevant to various purposes and disciplines. This variation awareness enables writers to become more proficient and to see texts more significantly as community-based artefacts. This is in line with Christie argument that a good scrutiny with the functional syntax exposes the linguistic aspects typical of the different subjects. On addressing school failure arising from the transition, Christie focuses on the issue of power and agrees that power works effectively in schools when it is not visible. It is under this perspective that she discusses the fact that language is very invisible and powerful than all else. She emphasizes the importance of language and argues that it is not a neutral commodity as seen by people. It is true that all content learned, be it Mathematics, English, Science, History and other disciplines are constructed using language; it is the main resource through which students as well as teachers in school form connotations. The best method of addressing the unquestionable control inherent in the difference genres written as well as read is to cause awareness to ensure noticeable numerous sides of the manners implication is created. This is important, as this has led to the emergence of genre theories, which have in turn attracted the idea of genre, can be effective in understanding the manner people use language to engage in various communicative situations and use this knowledge to assist student writers to produce communicatively functional texts (Paltridge 2001). There is also the suggestion that the best time of introducing elemental genres is when the adolescents or children have a realistic understanding of the canonical genre structures. This can address the issue of school failure because the teachers can understand what to change, challenge, or subvert before proceeding to ensure that confusion does not occur as it discourages students. Conclusion Understanding genres enables categorization the sort of texts, which are written in target academic, occupational, or social contexts. This is because genres are not just comprehensively defined classes but groups of texts or families, which are related by uniformity; different genres are evident in the same sentences. In this view, genres amount to a series of transitions or displacements between texts an aspect, which has made genres a particularly useful for the analysis and description of textual forms. The individual genre may be regarded as a mobile textual field in which branches or new subcategories are constantly being developed. This is in line with Christie argument that genres evolve in response to changes under various writing and communicative needs. When texts are used recurrently to perform more or less similar social and cultural functions, prototypical forms develop almost automatically. In this manner, elemental genres are dominant, as they characterize canonical manners of creating implication and realizing important objectives, communal, social, and personal in all cultures. Genres are thus indeed defined with reference to a common pool of textual features; however, not all members of the group may share these features. This is in line with the view that every elemental genre leads to a family of genres or associated assemblage of genres, which differ in some way but bear a connection to one other. Without doubt, genres have an undoubted power, which resides in them and the most effective way of addressing it is by bringing them to perception to make the numerous sides of the manner meaning is generated. Reference List Christie F 2012, Language Education throughout the School Years: a Functional Perspective, Michigan, Wiley-Blackwell. Christie, F & Derewianka, B 2008, School Discourse. Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling, Continuum, London. Johns, A 2002, Introduction. In A. Johns, Genre in the classroom (pp3-13), New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum. Frow, J 2005, Genre, Routledge, London. Halliday, M 1985, Spoken and Written Language, Deakin University Press, Geelong Australia. Hyland, K 2004, Genre and Second Language Writing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Martin, J 1999, Mentoring semogenesis: ‘genre based’ literacy pedagogy’, in F. Christie (ed.), Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes, Cassell, London. Paltridge, B 2001, Genre and the language classroom, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Sietel, P 2003, Theorizing Genres: Interpreting Works, New Literary History, vol. 34, no. 279, pp. 275-297. Strickland, D & Alvermann, D (eds.) (2004), Bridging the Literacy Achievement Gap, Grades 4-12, Teachers College Press, London. Read More