Gordon,
Two thoughts/questions on your comments below.
I understand here that you are using speech genres not int the Bakthinian
sense (i.e., as types of utterance, spoken or written), but as spoken
genres vs. written genres (in the Halliday sense, I take it). I'm
wondering whether you see a strong distinction between spoken and written
genres, and, if so, how you would deal with discourse that mixes them
(e.g., reading aloud, political speeches, play scripts, written
representations of speech, spoken representations of written texts,etc.)?
On Aviva Freedman's work. She has made the explicit-implicit distinction
quite stark in my reading of her work, seeming to deny for example that
workplaces engage in any direct instruction of writing or even in
intentional structuring of worker's literacy enculturation. I certainly
see most of genre development as tacit and don't think rules really can
describe genres (if describing involves the way content and social
relations are handled and the possibility of quite flexible, non-canonical,
sometimes transformative performances); however, I think we should see
direct instruction, rules of thumb, explicitly stated guidance, and
especially provided models *as* elements of situated learning, part of the
process, even if analysis makes clear that the rules and models are
insufficient or even inaccurate. (And that kind of explicit guidance
certainly goes on in relation to many kinds of talk as well as text;
verbally scripting children's speech as they talk on the phone is one
example--not universal, just an example I've witnessed and engaged in,
though Bambi Schieffelin's description of this kind of scripting among the
Kaluli, what they call elema "say like this" talk, suggests it's not just a
Western practice.) As Hanks and others have suggested, our everyday
metadiscursive ideologies and notions form part of what we employ to
produce and co-ordinate our discourse practices.
>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
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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