How about the valued genres that discourse communities that “possess in the communicative furtherance of their goals”? (Swales 1990: 26) Again, we run into instability and evolution of texts augmented by the situated nature of literacies. Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), borrowing from Bakhtin (1981), note the centripetal forces that contribute to the prototypicality of genres across situations but the centrifugal forces that require that a genre be revised for a specific rhetorical situation.
3.3. Situated texts and their domains (activity systems)
Therefore, though valued genres and discourse communities may, in fact, be highly salient to disciplinary faculty, it is the specific situation in which a genre appears that determines how it will be successfully written and interpreted. In a new volume on the rhetoric of everyday life, Nystrand and Duffy (2003: vii) discuss the importance of this situated ness:
...the leading edge of research on writing, reading, and literacy these days is defined by its intersection with sociocultural, historical, political, disciplinary, instrumental and everyday context –each situated and domain-specific
In each situation, writers draw from community genre knowledge and domain and revise texts to serve their own purposes within a rhetorical site. To give a personal example: though I wrote many acceptance and rejection letters (each of which was somewhat different) in my years as co-editor of the journal, English for Specific Purposes, my more recent letters in the same genre written as guest editor of a special issue of Across the Disciplines are varied to meet the requirements of that journal and the particular context and audience with which I am working. What can I borrow from my accumulated genre knowledge? Certain forms of politeness and format and not much else.
Each rhetorical situation is highly complex, of course, for it embodies the values and genres of the discourse community and their interactions, writer purposes, the physical attributes of the context, and other factors. How can we theorize a literacy site, then? Russell (1997), drawing from theories developed by Cole and Engeström (1993), posits that activity theory may provide explanatory adequacy. The key term in activity theory is “system.” There is an activity system (such as a laboratory) in which a variety of texts appear, are developed, and interact. Participants “use certain genres but not others at certain times but not others” so there is also a genre system within the context. And, of course, there is a group of people with different roles (also a system) who are involved in meaningful and productive activities in the site. Russell (1997: 520) uses the activity system of the classroom to show how participants interact through texts:
The teacher writes the assignments; the students write responses in classroom genres. The administrators write the grade for; the teacher fills it out. The parents or government officials write the checks; the administrators write the receipts and send out the transcripts. It is through this microstructural circulation of texts and other tools in genres, these regularized shared expectations for tool use within and among systems of purposeful interaction that macro social structure is (re-)created. At the same time in the same fundamental way, the identities of individuals and groups and subgroups are (re-) created.
Russell (1997: 522) points out that an activity system is both temporarily stabilized and evolving, that the genres that appear at any moment in time are only stabilized-for-now. Thus “genres predict – but do not determine [the text] structure.”
We teachers are very familiar with the classroom. However, different systems operate in other literacy sites. Windsor (2000: 164), studying an engineering firm, discovered complex, overlapping systems and a hierarchical writing process during which the technicians’ work “disappeared into the work of the engineers.” She concludes that “being in a powerful position may allow one to use the knowledge someone else has generated, but being able to use that knowledge is one of the things that generates the powerful position.” In her research, the systems interact and the writing of technicians is buried as engineers produce the valued genres.
Mathieson (2004), studying engineering in an academic setting, found that the “texts” central to journal articles and grants are, not surprisingly, visual and numerical, thus influencing that particular activity system.
What can we say, then, to the teachers, and their students, who are looking for answers, who want researchers to inform them about what the experts in their disciplines know and how to read and write successfully in a number of contexts? How can we make the complex nature of writer purpose, activity system, and “stabilized for now” genres accessible to students? If we even understood the activity systems in which our students will be working, could we replicate them, and their genres, for the classroom? Freedman and Medway (1994: 11), North American New Rhetoricians (see Johns 2002, for a discussion of their theories and research.) claim that we cannot import students’ authentic literacy experiences into our EAP classrooms. However, Coe, another New Rhetorician, claims that an appropriate use of the term “genre” opens the door to student discovery. Coe (1994: 159) claims that “Genre epitomizes the significance of approaching reading and writing as social processes in which individuals participate without necessarily being entirely conscious of what the social processes are.” He continues by arguing that we need to raise students’ consciousness of the complex and social nature of texts within academic and professional settings.
For years, I have been working on this consciousness raising in my own first year university classroom (Johns 1997). Now, I am attempting to write a first year university textbook intended to be both appropriate to the research topics I have discussed here and accessible to busy teachers and students (Johns in process). Needless to say, it is not an easy job; but others have already entered this field (Trimmer 2001; Devitt, Reigg, and Bawarshi 2004) and it is important for our pedagogical work to reflect research and theory.
3.4. Multi-modal environments
So far, I have not mentioned the activity systems that are central to most of our students’ lives, found on the Internet, ipods, and in other technologies. Many of our (more privileged) students have grown up with technology; they use the Internet, the cell phone, the palm pilot and other tools frequently and for a variety of purposes. This dependence upon technology marks a truly significant departure from reliance upon print texts. In a recent discussion of the influences of computers upon writing, for example, Chartier (1995: 15) says:
...the substitution of the screen for codex is a far more radical transformation than that brought on by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press; it changes the methods of organization, structure, consultation, and even the appearance of the written word.
We see evidence for Chartier’s argument every day. By producing texts in these environments (e.g., web-logs/blogs), students can bring their personal lives to the world. They can write expressively in short, fragmented, and ungrammatical texts and be read immediately by often appreciative audiences. They can make links, use gestures, and impart visual information with technical ease. However, these technologies do not encourage extended, thoughtful, critical and well-argued texts. And that’s a problem for EAP writing classes. In their landmark publication, Cope and Kalantzis (2000: 7) speak of six “design elements” in our current students’ meaning making processes:
Linguistic meaning (now, of course, complicated by the implications of corpus linguistics)
Audio meaning (noise is central to our students’ lives)
Visual meaning (in various media, including the Internet)
Gestural meaning (including “gestures” in texts)
Special meaning (again, the Internet provides significant possibilities)
The Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes to each other.
How do we bring these meanings into the EAP classroom? How can assist students in analyzing and critiquing their varied textual experiences? Here is a great opportunity to draw from what they know to lead them into information competence and visual literacy activities such as critiquing websites.
Also important to our teaching can be the technological tools, the many sources available to students on the Internet for their writing, in particular. I happen to be working with Houghton Mifflin on my textbook (Johns in process), so I am most familiar with their tool, Write Space, which undoubtedly resembles other literacy tools of this type. Write Space is embedded within the Blackboard Classroom management system, providing modules for process writing, interactive exercises, an on-line handbook, real time tutoring and feedback. My editors tell me that they will be able to tailor a Write Space component to interact with my textbook, to use the Internet for a variety of approaches to understanding the complexity of genre and context.
Thus the new technologies offer challenges to EAP as students use it for quick chat and research. They also give us possibilities for out-of-class literacy assistance. We need to make full use of their potential in our academic literacy classrooms as we draw from students’ interests and knowledge.
3.5. The writer in the text: voice, persona, stance, and evaluation
Amidst this talk about context, genres, and technology, the writer still must still be considered in research. Silva and Brice (2004) find the concept of writer’s voice to be an emerging issue in L2 language research. I-chat and BLOGS are voiced, expressive, personal, and often direct, and our students love this
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