Genre and Discourse Analysis in

Language for Specific Purposes

KEN HYLAND

Language for specific purposes (LSP) refers to a distinctive approach to language educa-
tion that focuses on the particular linguistic features, discourse practices, and communica-
tive skills used by target groups. Its success depends on accurately identifying what these
features and practices are so they can be taught to students, and this has been greatly
assisted since the late 1980s by the emergence of genre analysis. Genre analysis has become
established as one of the most popular and productive frameworks for the study of spe-
cialized communication in academic, professional, and institutional contexts. Essentially,
the approach is used to describe texts within textual and social contexts, rejecting the idea
that individual texts should be treated in isolation from either their use or other texts. This
entry will offer an overview of the importance of genre and discourse analysis in this area
of research and pedagogy.

Discourse and Genre Analysis

Discourse analysis is a collection of methods for studying language in action, looking at

texts in relation to the social contexts in which they are used, but this broad definition has
been interpreted in various ways across the social sciences. This is because language is an
irreducible part of social life, and connected to almost everything we do. Discourse analysis,
in fact, spreads between two poles, giving more or less emphasis to concrete texts or to
institutional social practices, but generally tending to focus on language phenomena that
occur above the level of the sentence. Genre analysis is a more specific form of discourse
analysis that focuses on any element of recurrent language use, including grammar and
lexis, that is relevant to the analyst’s interests. Genres are the recurrent uses of more-or-
less conventionalized forms through which individuals develop relationships, establish
communities, and get things done using language. As a result, genre analysis sees texts
as representative of wider rhetorical practices and so has the potential to offer descriptions
and explanations of both texts and the communities that use them.
Genre analysts set out to offer descriptions of “typified acts of communication” based
on the form and purposes of texts. Fundamentally, genres are kinds of broad rhetorical
templates that writers draw on to respond to repeated situations; users see certain language
choices as representing effective ways of getting things done in familiar contexts. Genre
analysis is therefore grounded in the assumption that the features of a similar group of
texts depend on the social context of their creation and use, and that those features can
be described in a way that relates a text to others like it and to the choices and constraints
acting on text producers. This is the very stuff of communication. O’Sullivan, Hartley,
Saunders, Montgomery, and Fiske (1994, p. 128), for instance, argue that “genres are agents
of ideological closure—they limit the meaning-potential of a given text,” while writers can
rely on readers already having some knowledge and expectations about the conventions
of a genre. We know immediately, for example, whether a text is an essay, a joke, or a
recipe, but we can also recognize innovation, irony, and creativity. Genres can thus be

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0452
2 genre and discourse analysis in lsp

seen as a kind of tacit contract between writers and readers, influencing the behavior of
text producers and the expectations of receivers.
While approaches to genre differ considerably in the emphasis they give to text or
context, the research methods they employ, and the types of pedagogies they encourage,
text-analytic varieties have had most impact in LSP contexts. These approaches are influ-
enced by Halliday’s (1994) view of language as a system of choices that link texts to
particular contexts through patterns of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features (Christie
& Martin, 1997), and by Swales’s (1990) observation that these recurrent choices are closely
related to the work of particular discourse communities whose members share broad social
purposes. These purposes are a key element of the context of a text and the rationale of a
genre; they help to shape the ways it is structured and the choices of content and style it
makes available. The following sections discuss the aspects of language usually studied,
the relationship between genre and context (both social and textual), and the application
of research to pedagogy.

Genre Structures and Features

Perhaps the most fruitful line of research in LSP has been to focus on genre as text, with
the aim of exploring the lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres
to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999, p. 22) calls “generic
integrity.” Analyzing this kind of patterning has yielded useful information about the
ways texts are constructed and the rhetorical contexts in which such patterns are used, as
well as providing valuable input for genre-based teaching.
Some of this research has followed the move-analysis work pioneered by Swales (1990),
which seeks to identify the recognizable stages of particular institutional genres and the
constraints on typical move sequences. Moves are the typical rhetorical steps that writers
or speakers use to develop their social purposes, and recent work on academic genres has
produced descriptions of the results sections in research articles (Bruce, 2009), dissertation
acknowledgments (Hyland, 2004c), and grant proposals (Connor, 2000). In professional
contexts, research has explored the structures of genres in direct mail letters (Upton, 2002)
and in management and legal cases (Lung, 2008).
While analyzing schematic structures has proved an invaluable way of looking at texts,
analysts are increasingly aware of the dangers of oversimplifying by assuming blocks of
texts to be mono-functional and ignoring writers’ complex purposes and “private intentions”
(Bhatia, 1999). There is also the problem raised by Crookes (1986) of validating analyses to
ensure they are not simply products of the analyst’s intuitions. Transitions from one move
to another in a text are, of course, always motivated outside the text as writers respond
to their social context, but analysts have not always been convincingly able to identify the
ways these shifts are explicitly signaled by lexico-grammatical patterning.
Research has therefore tended to move more toward examining clusters of register, style,
lexis, and other features that often distinguish particular genres. One feature of academic
genres to receive attention is writers’ use of evaluative that constructions in articles and
dissertations (Hyland & Tse, 2005). This is a structure that allows a writer to thematize
evaluative meanings by presenting a complement clause following that (as in We believe
that this is an interesting construction). Other recent studies have looked at circumstance
adverbials in student presentations (Zareva, 2009), interactive features of undergraduate
lectures (Morell, 2004), and the common four-word collocations, or lexical bundles, in
student dissertations (Hyland, 2008). In other domains, research has identified genre
characteristics such as the use of conjunctive cohesion in EU documents (Trebits, 2009)
and metadiscourse markers in professional e-mails (Jensen, 2009). A feature of much recent
 genre and discourse analysis in lsp 3

work has been to investigate how persuasion in various genres is accomplished not only
through the ways ideas are presented, but also by the construction of an appropriate
authorial self and the negotiation of participant relationships.

Genre and Community

The importance of genre to LSP studies results from the growing body of evidence
that professional and academic discourses represent a variety of specific literacies, so that
what counts as convincing argument, appropriate tone, persuasive interaction, and so on
is managed for a particular audience (Hyland, 2004a). More specifically, researchers have
become sensitive to the ways genres are written and responded to by individuals acting
in concert with others. This community-based orientation to literacy draws attention to
the idea that we communicate as members of social groups, each with its own norms,
categorizations, sets of conventions, and ways of doing things.
Essentially, members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognizing similari-
ties in the texts they use frequently, and they are able to draw on their repeated experiences
with such texts to read, understand, and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is, in
part, because writing is a practice based on expectations. The process of writing involves
creating a text that the writer assumes the reader will recognize and expect, and the
process of reading involves drawing on assumptions about what the writer is trying to
do. Writer and reader assemble sense from a text by anticipating what the other is likely
to do by making connections to prior texts.
Genre analysis therefore reveals the ways that genres reflect and construct the com-
munities that use them, as Swales observes:

In-group abbreviations, acronyms, argots, and other special terms flourish and multiply;
beyond that, these discourse communities evolve their own conventions and traditions
for such diverse verbal activities as running meetings, producing reports, and publiciz-
ing their activities. These recurrent classes of communicative events are the genres that
orchestrate verbal life. These genres link the past and the present, and so balance forces
for tradition and innovation. They structure the roles of individuals within wider frame-
works, and further assist those individuals with the actualization of their communicative
plans and purposes. (1998, p. 20)

The idea that people acquire, use, and modify texts while acting as members of academic,
occupational, or social groups offers a powerful way of describing communities and under-
standing the communication needs of students in professional and academic contexts.
A recent development in genre studies has been the growth of ethnographic approaches
as a way of accessing features of the context and of the processes of production that may
explain particular aspects of genres. Research into situated academic discourse, such as
J. Swales’s “textography” (1998) and A. Johns’s “students as researchers” work (1997),
indicates how ethnographic methods, such as observation of physical sites of genre activ-
ity and interviews with individuals who read or write a genre, can provide access to these
communities and their genre use.

Genre Constellations

Another aspect of context lies in the ways that texts relate to other texts, forming “constella-
tions” with neighboring genres (Swales, 2004). An important aspect of such constellations
is that we almost never find genres in isolation. A useful concept here is that of “genre
4 genre and discourse analysis in lsp

sets,” referring to the part of the entire genre constellation that a particular individual or
group engages in, either productively or receptively (Devitt, 1991). Textbooks, lab reports,
and lectures, for instance, may be key genres for many science students, while discussion
postings and online tutorials are genres more familiar to distance-learning students on
teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) programs. We can also approach
genre constellations through “genre chains,” a term that refers to the way spoken and
written texts cluster together in a given social activity. Thus genres sometimes follow each
other in a predictable chronological order, such as a job application that involves a step-
wise procedure through job advertisement, curriculum vitae, application letter, interview,
and so on.
Moving beyond the immediate context to the wider “context of culture,” genres can be
seen as institutional social practices. From this perspective, genres are loosely arrayed in
a network as each interacts with, draws on, and responds to another in a particular setting.
This view refers to Bakhtin’s (1986) concept of intertextuality and the fact that every utter-
ance reacts to other utterances in that domain. While this totality is constantly changing,
analysis can help show how text users are linked into a network of prior texts according
to their group membership. These interconnections can be characterized as both inter-
textual and interdiscursive. “Interdiscursivity” concerns the use of elements in a text that
carry institutional and social meanings from other discourses, reflecting the conventions,
values, and practices of neighboring discourses.
One example of how an institutional genre is linked into a web of interdiscursivity is
the undergraduate syllabus (Afros & Schryer, 2009), which is linked not only to other
course documents and texts but also to wider understandings of the institution and the
discipline itself. As the authors point out:

The syllabus reveals that the social creation of knowledge taking place in the course draws
on lectures, textbooks, and other in-class and out-of-class learning/teaching activities as
much as on the ongoing discussion in the academic field, adult education, university
policies, and many other texts and communities. Instructors utilize the syllabus not only
to manifest their membership in multiple discourse communities, but also to socialize
students into (at least, some of ) them. (p. 231)

Thus, the syllabus highlights the interdependences between the classroom, research, and
institutional genres.

Genre Pedagogies

The findings produced by genre studies have had a major impact on LSP teaching. This
is because genre descriptions ground teaching in research and support learners through
an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured and the reasons they are writ-
ten as they are. The potential advantages of genre-based instruction for writing can be
summarized as follows (Hyland, 2004b):

Explicit Makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of

writing skills.
Systematic Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language
and contexts.
Needs-based Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from
target needs.
Supportive Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students’ learning and
creativity.
 genre and discourse analysis in lsp 5

Empowering Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in

valued texts.
Critical Gives students the resources to understand and challenge valued
discourses.
Consciousness raising Increases teachers’ awareness of texts and helps them confidently
advise students on writing.

While these characteristics are not unique to genre pedagogy, no other approach seeks to
realize them all.
LSP practitioners employ genre pedagogies as a means of emphasizing what is to be
learned, organizing instruction around the genres that learners need and the social contexts
in which they will operate (Hyland, 2004b). This typically involves adopting a scaffolded
pedagogy to guide learners toward control of a genre based on whole texts selected in
relation to learner needs. Based on sociocultural learning theory (Vygotsky, 1978), scaffold-
ing is a metaphor of learning that refers to the supportive behaviors by which an expert
can help a novice learner to gradually achieve higher, independent levels of performance.
In LSP classrooms it involves active and sustained support by a teacher who models
appropriate strategies for meeting particular purposes, guides students in their use of the
strategies, and provides a meaningful and relevant context for using the strategies.
Texts and tasks are therefore selected according to learners’ needs and genres are
modeled explicitly to provide learners with something to aim for, namely an understand-
ing of what readers are likely to expect. One approach widely used in Australia is the
teaching–learning cycle (e.g., Feez, 1998), which helps inform the planning of classroom
activities by showing the process of learning a genre as a series of linked stages. Here
the teacher provides initial explicit knowledge and guided practice, moves to sharing
responsibility for developing texts, and gradually withdraws support until the learner can
work alone. The key stages of the cycle are

• setting the context—to reveal genre purposes and the settings in which it is commonly
used,
• modeling—analyzing representative samples of the genre to identify its stages and
key features and the variations that are possible,
• joint construction—guided, teacher-supported practice in the genre through tasks that
focus on particular stages or functions of the text,
• independent construction—independent writing by students monitored by the teacher,
• comparing—relating what has been learned to other genres and contexts to understand
how genres are designed to achieve particular social purposes.

Each of these stages seeks to achieve a different purpose, and so is associated with dif-
ferent types of classroom activities and teacher–learner roles (Hyland, 2004b, pp. 130–40).

Critiques

Genre approaches have not been uncritically adopted in LSP classrooms. Situated-learning
theorists (e.g., Dias & Pare, 2000), for example, argue that writing is always part of the
goals and occasions that bring it about and that it cannot be learned in the inauthentic
context of the classroom. Such a view, however, ignores the fact that second language (L2)
students are often at a considerable disadvantage in such unfamiliar naturalistic settings
and that genre-based teaching can cut short the long processes of situated acquisition.
Critical theorists have also attacked genre teaching, for accommodating learners both to
existing modes of practice and to the values and ideologies of the dominant culture that
6 genre and discourse analysis in lsp

the valued genres embody (e.g., Benesch, 2001). Genre proponents, however, contend that
this argument can be leveled at almost all teaching approaches, and that learning about
genres does not preclude critique but, in fact, provides a necessary basis for critical engage-
ment with cultural and textual practices.
Finally, genre teachers have had to defend themselves against process adherents and
the charge that genre instruction inhibits writers’ self-expression and straitjackets creativ-
ity through conformity and prescriptivism (e.g., Dixon, 1987). Obviously the dangers of a
static, decontextualized pedagogy are very real if teachers fail to acknowledge variation
and apply what Freedman (1994, p. 46) calls “a recipe theory of genre.” But there is noth-
ing inherently prescriptive in a genre approach. There is no reason why providing students
with an understanding of discourse should be any more prescriptive than, say, providing
them with a description of a clause or the parts of a sentence. The fact is that genres do
have a constraining power that inevitably limits the originality of individual writers.
Selecting a particular genre implies the use of certain patterns, but this does not dictate the
way we write: it enables us to make choices and facilitates expression. The ability to create
meaning is only made possible by the possibility of alternatives. By ensuring these options
are available to students we give them the opportunity to make such choices, and for many
LSP learners this awareness of regularity and structure is both facilitating and reassuring.

Conclusions

LSP instruction seeks to help demystify prestigious forms of discourse, unlock students’
creative and expressive abilities, and facilitate their access to greater life chances. To
accomplish these goals teachers require a systematic means of describing texts and of
making their students’ control over them more achievable. In short, a well-formulated
theory of how language works in human interaction has become an urgent necessity in
the field of teaching languages for specific purposes. Genre pedagogies are a major response
to this need, providing teachers with a way of understanding how writing is shaped by
individuals making language choices to achieve purposes in social contexts.

SEE ALSO: Critical English for Academic Purposes; Genre-Based Language Teaching;
Swales, John M.; Systemic Functional Linguistics; Writing and Genre Studies

References

Afros, E., & Schryer, C. F. (2009). The genre of syllabus in higher education. Journal of English
for Academic Purposes, 8(3), 224–33.
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for academic purposes. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bhatia, V. K. (1999). Integrating products, processes, purposes and participants in professional
writing. In C. N. Candlin & K. Hyland (Eds.), Writing: Texts, processes and practices (pp. 21–39).
London, England: Longman.
Bruce, I. (2009). Results sections in sociology and organic chemistry articles: A genre analysis.
English for Specific Purposes, 28(2), 105–24.
Christie, F., & Martin, J. R. (Eds.). (1997). Genre in institutions: Social processes in the workplace and
school. New York, NY: Continuum.
Connor, U. (2000). Variations in rhetorical moves in grant proposals of US humanists and
scientists. Text, 20(1), 1–28.
Crookes, G. (1986). Towards a validated analysis of scientific text structure. Applied Linguistics,
7, 57–70.
 genre and discourse analysis in lsp 7

Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradisi (Eds.), Textual
dynamics of the professions (pp. 336–57). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dias, P., & Pare, P. (Eds.). (2000). Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press.
Dixon, J. (1987). The question of genres. In I. Reid (Ed.), The place of genre in learning: Current
debates (pp. 9–21). Geelong, Australia: Deakin University.
Feez, S. (1998). Text-based syllabus design. Sydney, Australia: Macquarie University/AMES.
Freedman, A. (1994). Anyone for tennis? In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the
new rhetoric (pp. 43–66). London, England: Taylor & Francis.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London, England:
Edward Arnold.
Hyland, K. (2004a). Disciplinary discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2004b). Genre and second language writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2004c). Graduates’ gratitude: The generic structure of dissertation acknowledgements.
English for Specific Purposes, 23(3), 303–24.
Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific
Purposes, 27(1), 4–21.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Evaluative that constructions: Signalling stance in research abstracts.
Functions of Language, 12(1), 39–64.
Jensen, A. (2009). Discourse strategies in professional e-mail negotiation: A case study. English
for Specific Purposes, 28(1), 4–18.
Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Lung, J. (2008). Discursive hierarchical patterning in law and management cases. English for
Specific Purposes, 27(4), 424–41.
Morell, T. (2004). Interactive lecture discourse for university EFL students. English for Specific
Purposes, 23(3), 325–38.
O’Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., & Fiske, J. (1994). Key concepts in
communication and cultural studies. London, England: Routledge.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. (1998). Other floors, other voices: A textography of a small university building. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Swales, J. (2004). Research genres. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Trebits, A. (2009). Conjunctive cohesion in English language EU documents: A corpus-based
analysis and its implications. English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 199–210.
Upton, T. (2002). Understanding direct mail letters as a genre. International Journal of Corpus
Linguistics, 7(1), 65–85.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zareva, A. (2009). Informational packaging, level of formality, and the use of circumstance
adverbials in L1 and L2 student academic presentations. Journal of English for Academic
Purposes, 8(1), 55–68.

Suggested Readings

Belcher, D. (Ed.). (2009). English for specific purposes in theory and practice. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. London, England:
Longman.
Candlin, C. N. (Ed.). (2002). Research and practice in professional discourse. Hong Kong, People’s
Republic of China: City University of Hong Kong Press.
8 genre and discourse analysis in lsp

Dudley-Evans, T., & St. John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for specific purposes: A multi-
disciplinary approach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P. (Eds.). (1994). Genre and the new rhetoric. London, England: Taylor
& Francis.
Hyland, K. (2006). English for academic purposes: An advanced resource book. London, England:
Routledge.
Hyland, K. (2009). Academic discourse. London, England: Continuum.
Johns, A. (Ed.). (2002). Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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