Phil,
You are right, I was very conscious in my posting, of the danger of
reification of genre. I certainly agree with the process/product
distinction with respect to the production of a particular text (see Jim
Martin's 1985 paper, Process and text: Two aspects of human semiosis). I
am less happy about the "thingification" of genre forms - what you were
referring to in <when we look at these processes as artefacts, we are
looking at *what* is produced within a given field>. What exactly is the
status of these artifacts? For most speech genres, there has been no
attempt to formulate the "rules" and even where there is such a
formulation it is typically known only to a small group of linguists who
are interested in such matters. At the same time, I agree: If it is
possible to capture the regularities that typify interaction in a
particular activity context then, in some sense, there is knowledgeable
skill relevant to that genre that is distributed among the members of the
CoP that uses it.
My concern about reification arises in the educational context. As Hasan
and others have shown, it is possible to describe the characteristic
formal organization of texts in particular genres - more so for some
genres than for others - but it's far from clear that in the process of
producing particular texts, speakers/writers "apply" the rules/norms so
described. So the question is whether it is helpful to teach genres as
sets of rules to be applied when speaking or writing. Aviva Freedman has
a good paper on this topic: 'Do as I say': The relationship between
teaching and learning new genres, (1994) in the book she coedited with
Peter Medway. She was arguing against the possibility of successfully
teaching the written genres of law and management through direct
instruction about the form in contexts outside the institutions in which
they are used. I think the arguments are even stronger when it comes to
speech genres. You have to be doing the activity in which the genres play
a mediating role in order to learn how to engage effectively in the
practice and, in such contexts, the goal is to further the activity.
Whether one is following the rules and producing a "good" exemplar of the
genre is probably rarely a concern except in the classroom.
Gordon Wells
OISE/University of Toronto
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