Re: Recognizing genre

Glenn Humphreys (glenhump who-is-at soonet.ca)
Tue, 09 Jun 1998 21:57:41 -0400

David (and the others who replied in back channel notes),

Thanks for the leads on my genre question. I have replied back channel to
most of these replies since they were sent this way to me.

I know these hidden conversations sometimes exasperate Mike Cole (sorry,
Mike!), so I am appending a snippet from a note I sent to one of my
correspondents to suggest what I am looking for -- for those who might be
interested in such issues. My apologies for any incoherencies, and for
taking up the disk space of those who are not interested:

<Begin Quotation>
Gordon [Wells] did two things. First, he identified genre patterns as
instances of the "operational" level of Leontiev's tri-level model of
activity, which ends up making them out to be mediational "tools" (in
Vygotsky's sense) in an action. Second, he hypothesized the notion of
different levels of genre pattern, and then suggested the I-R-F discourse
pattern as an instance of a micro-genre. It was all quite theoretical,
although illustrated by some interesting case work data. He did not go on
to talk about other genre types. His notion of the micro-genre seems to
look a bit like Eggins' instances of narrative genre patterns that appear
in casual conversation.
In my own situation, I created a certain kind of trans-situational literacy
program for adult highschool students, and then recorded the instructional
talk that took place. Hence, I created my own instructional discourse
patterns (can I even call them "genres"?). I isolated a "major stage"
structure for the whole instructional discourse episode, in the manner
Eggins describes in her book __An intro to systemic functional
linguistics__. (This looked to me like the kind of process that
ethnographers go through when they are coding data). I then decided
(discovered?) that each of these major stages could be broken down into
some smaller component "minor" stages. As I go "down", it looks like the
pattern of the minor discourse stage sequences become even less regular
than are the major stages. I now suspect that it makes more sense to talk
about rearrangements of the major and minor stage sequences as happening
according to context influences than it does as a result of any inherent
structural regularity in the discourse patterns themselves. In other
words, this kind of instructional discourse seems closer to Eggins' "casual
conversation" than it does to the kind of very highly ritualized discourse
that Hasan describes in her "service encounters".

In any case, it was this kind of thinking that is making me look for
articles that talk about these kinds of discourse patterns that show up
between the two extremes of the "service encounter" and the "casual
conversation". For example, although I would say my patterns are situation
specific, how widespread do they have to be before I can even call them
"genre" patterns? That is, do we need a new term such as "situational
discourse patterns" that recognizes regularities, but doesn't want to make
any claims for wide universality of occurence??

I suspect that such articles are going to have to wrestle with the whole
notion of who gets to say what counts as a genre "instance" (perhaps only
the experienced culture member?), and what considerations a researcher must
keep in mind when coding these patterns ( the typical concerns of the
ethnographer, such as "rapport building" and "triangulation procedure"?).
Since I was the teacher of this instructional program, in a school with
which I was intimately familiar, I was both teacher (i.e. experienced
culture member) and researcher. If it is the culture members who get the
last word on what is a situational "genre" then I guess that I (as a
teacher-researcher) get to say whatever I want about my patterns, don't I?
An interesting situation to be in . . .
<End Quotation>

--glenn

Glenn D. Humphreys
P.O. Box 11
Echo Bay, Ontario
Canada, P0S 1C0
Telephone: (705) 248-1226
Internet: glenhump who-is-at soonet.ca
Fax (Phone/Email to arrange fax transmission): (705) 248-1226