Genres and Institutions: Functional Perspectives on Educational Discourse
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GENRES AND INSTITUTIONS: FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE
INTRODUCTION
A genre is itself an institution, for it is a socially sanctioned means of constructing and negotiating meanings, functioning so that it mediates the operation of other social institutions, taking its place in the complex interconnecting series of activities and events that constitute social life. Hence, while it is certainly possible to write of genres and institutions, like those of schooling, of the marketplace, or of family life, to mention a few, they are best understood as themselves institutional in character, and part of the fabric of social life. The notion of genres is relatively old, although scholarly interest in it for the purposes of educational linguistics is reasonably recent, dating from the late 1970s and 1980s, while its origins may in turn be dated a little earlier. All traditions of the relevant research acknowledge that genres are found both in speech and writing. However, in practice, it is genres and their role in literacy pedagogy which have generated the greatest body of research, as well as the most heated and lively debates. This paper will briefly review aspects of the development of genre theory, examining in particular these developments as they have had consequences for discussions of educational discourse. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Paltridge (2007) writes that the term ‘genre’ came into use in educational discussions in the 1980s in at least three areas: the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) tradition originally associated with Halliday (1974); English for Specific Purposes (ESP), following Swales (e.g. 1990); and the New Rhetoric studies (e.g. Miller, 1984/1994). While the decade of the 1980s clearly was a productive one, genre-related studies emerged from developments in linguistic theory and research of the 1950s and 1960s. This was a period when linguistic research burgeoned and moved in several directions, not all of them functional or socially driven. Important examples of research with a strong functional and socially driven interest included that of Halliday and his colleagues (Halliday et al., 1967) in the British context and, in the North American context, that of such scholars as Hymes (1967), Gumperz (1968) and Labov (1972). Overall, the interest in genre had its genesis M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 29–40. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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FRANCES CHRISTIE
in the broader scholarly interest in studies of language variety and/or register that enlivened linguistic research from the 1950s on. For Halliday, like his teacher Firth, the study of language was necessarily social, because language is only comprehensible in terms of its uses and functions in social process, and he was to mount an ambitious account of the nature of language as a social semiotic, powerfully involved in the construction of social experience. Having provided his first discus
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