Making sense of a generic label: A study of genre (re)cognition among novice genre analysts

Making sense of a generic label through linguistic context analysis: A study of genre (re)cognition among novices’
Considerable work has been done on written and spoken genres characterized by a high degree of ritualization with “predictable elements occurring in a predictable order” (Fairclough 2003: 72; Swales 1990). In such studies, analysis of generic structure (moves/ stages) has been predominant and highly relevant for understanding institutionalized motives and the rhetorical objectives carried by each move (Lassen 2006). In a similar vein, Bhatia (2004: 22) has suggested that “genre analysis is the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings, whether defined in terms of typification of rhetorical action, as in Miller (1984), Bazerman (1994) and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), regularities of staged, goal-oriented social processes, as in Martin, Christie and Rothery (1987) and Martin (1993), or consistency of communicative purposes as in Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993)”. Common to these definitions are the notions of predictability and recognition of generic patterns, notions that are, however, not unproblematic. This article therefore addresses the following pertinent questions: How do novices without prior knowledge of a genre manage to assign it to a genre category? To what extent are related and recognizable genres used as mediational means (Bawarchi and Reiff 2010: 103) in genre determination, and how may linguistic context analysis (Bhatia 2008) assist the analytical process?
Inspired by Sommers and Saltz (2004), Bhatia (2008) and Tardy (2009), these research questions will be addressed on the basis of 55 exam papers written in January 2014 by 3rd year undergraduate students. The exam tested students’ competences in genre and discourse analysis as part of a course in Management and Communication. In the exam question, students were introduced to two apparently different genres. These included a genre that was so far unfamiliar to the students, viz. a ‘Suppliers Code of Conduct’, and a second genre (a job advertisement) that the students had studied during the course leading up to the exam. Given the lack of situated cognition (Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010: 79) of one of these genres, the students were requested to produce arguments and justification for assigning the genres presented to them to two different genre colonies and categories.
To address these issues and drawing on linguistic analysis, this article explores and discusses some of the arguments and justifications presented by the students in the process of becoming acquainted with an unfamiliar genre. For this purpose arguments and justifications made by top-grade achievers are compared to those produced by low-grade achievers, and the extent to which the two groups respectively rely on mediational means (genres and models) is discussed in view of assessing the students’ cognitive skills and ability to apply relevant linguistic concepts in their genre categorization attempts.
The contribution relates to the overall theme of the volume by focusing on (ii) “methods, addressing the question of what methodology we need to adequately map out the complex interactions between content, context and grammar creating genre meaning”.