Analysing-genre-Language-use-in-professional-settings

Pergamon

English for S~,cific Purposes, Vol. 14, No. 3. pp. 257 265. 1995

Ek~vier ~ience Ltd. Printed in the USA.

Reviews

ANALYSING GENRE: LANGUAGE USE IN PROFESSIONAL

SETTINGS. Vijay K. Bhatia. London: Longman, 1993, vii + 246pp.

Reviewed by Helen Drury

Analysing Genre

is a timely and welcome addition to the literature on genre

analysis in ESP. As Candlin points out in his editor's preface,

genre

can mean

many things to many people, not least applied linguists, language teachers, and

students. Increasingly used in a variety of teaching and research settings, it is

a slippery word to define, a "word with a sting in its tail" (p. ix) as Candlin

terms it enormously helpful as a concept for explaining why texts are the

way they are but also problematic in both its meaning and application. Thus

Bhatia's is an important contribution to the clarification of the concept of genre,

the methodology of genre analysis, and its applications, especially in the field

of ESP. His book will prove especially useful for practitioners in both teaching

and research settings as it not only provides a clear, step-by-step approach to

undertaking genre analysis but also supports this approach with detailed expla-

nation and exemplification of a number of professional and academic genres.

Analyshzg Genre

is divided into three parts: the first provides theoretical

background; the second and by far the longest part- explains how genre

analysis works in different academic and professional settings; and the third

exemplifies the application of genre analysis in both language teaching and

language reform.

Part 1 begins with an historical explanation of the development of genre-

analytic approaches to the description of texts. Bhatia sees this as a movement

from purely descriptive approaches in discourse analysis to explanatory

approaches which he terms

lhick desoqptions

of language in use. This thick

description of a text or its genre analysis relies on contributions from a number

of disciplines, each of which is outlined in turn. Although Bhatia's definition of

non-fictional genre follows that of Swales (p. 13), he also distances himself #om

Swales in emphasizing what he calls the psychological aspects of genre descrip-

tion. According to Bhatia, psychology contributes to the structure of a genre at

two levels. At a more macro-level, genres can be differentiated from each other

or from sub-genres of the same genre by the

discriminative stralegies

which

members of a discourse community typically ch(x)se to achieve a particular

communicative purpose. These strategies are reflected in the typical regulari-

ties of organization in the genre or its

cognitive move structure. Non-disc~qnd-

natit,e slralegies,

in contrast, operate at a more micro-level in text. They do not

change the overall communicative purpose of the genre and so do not change

257

258 Reviews

the genre itself. They reflect the range of rhetorical strategies open to an

individual writer for fulfilling the requirements of the communicative intention

of the move, which in turn reflects the communicative purl~)se of the genre.

Bhatia admits that there are difficulties in applying these concepts to all genres,

as well as in using them to clearly distinguish between genres and sub-genres.

In addition, there seems to be an essential contradiction in attributing these

move structures to psychology since they are not only "the property of the

genre" (p. 32) that is, part of the individual text itself but also because

they reflect "accumulated and conventionalized social knowledge" (p. 21), i.e.,

socio-cultural factors.

Whether such move structures are essentially motivated by psychological

factors or socio-cultural factors remains open to debate; however, the attempt

to describe a text as a genre made up of a series of stages or moves whose

linguistic and discoursal features can be explained in terms of communicative

purpose is of great value in both pedagogical and research settings. A clear

seven-part, step-by-step account of how one might go about this is given at the

end of the first part of the bcx)k. One of those steps is of course linguistic analy-

sis, which Bhatia rightly emphasizes as of great interest to language teachers

and students, tle proposes three levels of linguistic analysis: (1) identifying

predominant features of the lexico-grammar; (2) describing

text-patterninll or

form-function correlations; and (3) determining cognitive move structures.

Although each level is explained and illustrated, the interconnections between

the levels are not well described and this could pose problems for language

teachers and students when analysing genres.

The most valuable parts of the book, namely the second and third parts,

contain a rich fund of examples of how to analyse genres and how to use genre

analysis in teaching or language reform situations. The inclusion of examples

goes some way towards clarifying the steps in genre analysis described above,

including linguistic analysis.

In Part 2, Bhatia uses the overriding notion of communicative purpose as a

means of identifying and differentiating among genres. For example, he argues

that job applications and sales promotion letters are both promotional genres

since they share the .same communicative purpose as reflected in their move

structure, especially in the move he identifies as self-appraisal in job applica-

tions and product detailing in sales promotion letlers. On the other hand,

abstracts and research article introductions are different genres serving differ-

ent communicative purposes. In discussing the move structure of research

article introductions, Bhatia seems to favour Swales' earlier four-move model

rather than his more recent three-move (CARS) model. Although Bhatia admits

that there are problems in move identification in some genre examples because

of a lack of clear form-function correlation, he advises clarifying the criteria

for move identification rather than combining moves. The last chapter in this

part of the book provides an extremely valuable description of legal genre

analysis, long an area of expertise for the author.

Part 3, the last part of the book, addresses the issue of application from the

perspective of the language teacher and language reformer. A genre-based