genre and academic writing in the disciplines

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Genre and academic writing in the disciplines

Ken Hyland

Language Teaching / Volume 41 / Issue 04 / October 2008, pp 543 - 562DOI: 10.1017/S0261444808005235, Published online: 01 October 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261444808005235

How to cite this article:Ken Hyland (2008). Genre and academic writing in the disciplines. Language Teaching, 41, pp543-562 doi:10.1017/S0261444808005235

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Lang. Teach. (2008), 41:4, 543–562 c© Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0261444808005235

Plenary Speeches

Genre and academic writing in the disciplines

Ken Hyland Institute of Education, University of London, [email protected]

The last decade has seen increasing attention given to the notion of genre and its applicationin language teaching and learning. Genre represents how writers typically use language torespond to recurring situations, pointing to the fact that texts are most successful when theyemploy conventions that other members of the community find familiar and convincing. Thiscommunity-based nature of genres suggests that their features will differ across disciplines,encouraging teachers to research the features of the texts their students need in order tomake these explicit in their classes. I examine some of the research understandings andpractical applications of these views by looking at what the approach offers teachers ofacademic writing.

1. Introduction

I want to address the conference theme of ‘teaching academic writing across and in thedisciplines’ through the lens of genre. I’ve chosen to focus on genre as many teachers areuncertain of what it is and because it has been quite slow to take off in academic literacycourses in Europe. I get the impression that teachers often see genre as a research tool ratherthan a teaching one, but this is a misconception. Genre is actually a robust pedagogicalapproach perfectly suited to the teaching of academic writing in many contexts as it serves akey instructional purpose: that of illuminating the constraints of social contexts on languageuse. A genre-based approach, in other words, brings research and teaching much closer andturns us all into students of texts. This process, I think, can make us better teachers.

Today, genre is one of the most important and influential concepts in literacy education.Basically, it is concerned with making explicit what experts produce when they write. Anunderstanding of the concept enables us to look beyond content, composing processes andgrammatical forms to see texts as socially situated attempts to communicate with readers. Inother words, it helps teachers to identify the kinds of texts that students will have to writein their target contexts and to organise their courses to meet these needs, ensuring thatcurriculum materials and activities are devised directly to support learners writing in theirdisciplines. I’ll organise this paper by briefly introducing genre and then go on to look at

Revised version of a plenary paper presented on 30 June 2007 at the biannual conference of the European Association ofthe Teaching of Academic Writing, held in Bochum, Germany.

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disciplinary differences in academic writing before saying something about the implicationsof genre for the classroom.

2. What is genre?

GENRE is a concept over-burdened with definitions so I’ll keep mine simple – it is a termfor grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond torecurring situations. It is, in other words, both a social and a cognitive concept. It helps usto theorise the common-sense labels we use to categorise texts and the situations where theyoccur. Essentially, it is based on the idea that members of a community usually have littledifficulty in recognising similarities in the texts they use frequently and are able to drawon their repeated experiences with such texts to read, understand and perhaps write themrelatively easily.

This is, in part, because writing is a practice based on expectations. The process of writinginvolves creating a text that the writer assumes the reader will recognise and expect. And theprocess of reading involves drawing on assumptions about what the writer is trying to do.Hoey (2001) says that this is like dancers following each other’s steps, each assembling sensefrom a text by anticipating what the other is likely to do by making connections to prior texts.While writing, like dancing, allows for creativity and the unexpected, established patternsoften form the basis of any variations. We know immediately, for example, whether a text is arecipe, a joke or a love letter and can respond to it immediately and even construct a similarone if we need to. As teachers, we develop the use of more specialised genres such as lessonplans, student reports, and teacher feedback (Hyland & Hyland 2006), bringing a degree ofexpertise to the ways we understand or write these familiar texts.

More precisely, we possess a SCHEMA of prior knowledge which we share with others andcan bring to our writing to express ourselves efficiently and effectively. Genre reminds us thatwhen we write we follow conventions for organising messages so that our reader can recogniseour purpose and follow our ideas. In other words we stage the development of our purposesthrough a series of moves or rhetorically distinct sub-purposes, like the introduction–body–conclusion pattern that you may have learnt to write essays at school, or the problem–solutionpattern of the narrative genre:

Situation: I am a teacher of ESL writing. (What is the situation?)Problem: My students couldn’t express themselves in writing. (What problem arose?)Response: I adopted a genre-based approach. (What did you do?)Evaluation of response: Now they can all write beautifully. (Did it fix the problem?)

Simple structures like this have been refined and developed so that, as I’ll discuss shortly, moveanalyses can inform our understanding of text organisation and language use in sophisticatedways.

In sum, by frequently writing or reading this genre we develop a schema which allows usto recognise an effective narrative. If one part is missing we have trouble understanding itand, as teachers, we can recognise this absence and help students address it.



K E N H Y L A N D : G E N R E A N D A C A D E M I C W R I T I N G 545

Table 1 Move structure of dissertation acknowledgements (based on Hyland 2004a).

Move Example

1. REFLECTING MOVE The most rewarding achievement in my life, as I approach middleage, is the completion of my doctoral dissertation.

2. THANKING MOVE

2.1 Presenting participants During the time of writing I received support and help from manypeople.

2.2 Thanks for academic help I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Robert Chau, whoassisted me in each step to complete the thesis.

2.3 Thanks for resources I am grateful to The Epsom Foundation, whose research travelgrant made the field work possible, and to the library staff whotracked down elusive texts for me.

2.4 Thanks for moral support Finally, thanks goes to wife, who has been an important source ofemotional support.

3. ANNOUNCING MOVE However, despite all this help, I am the only person responsible forerrors in the thesis.

3. Genre patterns

Genre approaches encourage us to look for organisational patterns and salient features, andwe find these in even the most apparently interpersonal and expressive kind of writing. In ananalysis of the acknowledgments in 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations written by Hong Kongspeakers of English (Hyland 2004a), for example, I found students used the structure shownin Table 1.

As we can see, the acknowledgement structure consists of a main Thanking movesandwiched between optional Reflecting and Announcing moves. So the writer opens witha brief introspection on his or her research experience. Then there is the core ThankingMove where credit is given to individuals and institutions for help with the dissertation,and this can consist of up to four steps. First, a sentence introducing those to be thanked,followed by thanks for academic help. This was the only step that occurred in every singletext. Supervisors were always mentioned, and always before anyone else, but sometimes otheracademics such as teachers appeared here too. Next there is thanks for providing resourcessuch as clerical, technical and financial assistance or access to data, followed by thanks formoral support from family and friends who gave encouragement, friendship, sympathy, etc.,and this occurred in two-thirds of all texts. The final Announcing Move was uncommon, buthere writers accepted responsibility to reclaim the thesis and show that it is not simply thework of those who supported them.

The analysis showed that this structure was common in almost all the acknowledgementsand that where steps occurred they did so in this described sequence. It also told me somethingabout the ways thanks is expressed in this genre. So of all the ways of expressing thanks (I am

grateful to, I appreciate, I want to thank, etc.) the noun thanks was used in over half of all cases. Also




Figure 1 MonoConc concordance of ‘special thanks’ in acknowledgements.

interesting is that it was modified by only three adjectives: special, sincere, and deep, with special

comprising over two-thirds of all cases. Figure 1 shows just one screen of a concordance forthis structure in the corpus.

When analysing these texts I also found that virtually all thanks included the reason foracknowledging the person, as in these examples:

(1) a. First of all, my grateful thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Angel Lin, for her consistentand never-failing encouragement, support and help.

b. My special gratitude goes to my family who made it possible for me to embark onwriting a Ph.D. thesis at all.

c. I should also thank my wife, Su Meng, who spent days and nights alone with ourdaughter taking care of all the tasks that should have been shared by me as a fatherand a husband.

This suggests that writers weren’t only addressing the people they acknowledged, whopresumably knew the help they had given, but a much wider audience. Interviews withstudents subsequently showed that writers used the acknowledgement as a strategy torepresent themselves as good researchers and sympathetic human beings who are deservingof the degree. So, looking at specific genres tells us a lot about how we create meanings;both the purposes writers are trying to achieve and the language they are using todo it.




4. Advantages of genre-based academic writing instruction

The main potential advantages of genre-based writing instruction can be summarised likethis (Hyland 2004b). Genre teaching can be:

Explicit Makes clear what is to be learnt to facilitate the acquisition of writingskills.

Systematic Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language andcontexts.

Needs-based Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from students’needs.

Supportive Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students’ learning andcreativity.

Empowering Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valuedtexts.

Critical Gives students the resources to understand and challenge valueddiscourses.

Consciousness- Increases teachers’ awareness of texts confidently to advise students onraising writing.

I am not claiming that all of these characteristics are unique to genre pedagogy, but Ican think of no other approach which seeks to realise them all. Perhaps the most importantfeature is that the approach sets out to provide students with an explicit understanding of howtarget texts are structured and why they are written in the ways they are. This explicitnessgives teachers and learners something to aim at, making writing outcomes clear rather thanrelying on hit-or-miss inductive methods where learners are expected to acquire the genresthey need from simply writing or the teacher’s feedback on their essays (Hyland 2003). Inother words, providing writers with a knowledge of appropriate language forms shifts writinginstruction from the implicit and exploratory to a conscious manipulation of language andchoice. As Christie (1987: 45) observes, making clear ‘the ways in which patterns of languagework for the shaping of meanings’ empowers both writers and teachers.

5. Genre and community

While genre has provided a powerful way of understanding situated language use, I think ithas led us to over-emphasise resemblances between texts at the expense of differences. Thisis because genre helps us to generalise: grouping together texts that have similar purposes,structures and contexts. Swales (1990) has made clear, however, that we need to see communityand genre TOGETHER to offer a framework of how meanings are socially constructed inwriting. This draws on Faigley’s (1986: 535) claim that writing ‘can be understood onlyfrom the perspective of a society rather than a single individual’ and Geertz’s (1973) view thatknowledge and writing depend on the actions of members of local communities. COMMUNITY,in fact, helps us not only interpret and understand genre use better but also to EXPLAIN genrevariation across different groups.




On the most general level, this is one reason why writing in English is so difficult forspeakers of other languages. While all possibilities are available to all users, what is seen aslogical, engaging, relevant or well-organised in writing often differs across cultures. Cultureisn’t the only explanation of course, and we can’t simply predict the ways students are likelyto write on the basis of assumed cultural preferences. But it is clear there are differentways of organising ideas and structuring arguments in different languages which can haveimplications for teachers of academic writing. Research suggests, for instance, that comparedwith many languages, academic texts in English tend to be more explicit about structure andpurposes, to be less tolerant of digressions, to be more cautious in making claims, and to usemore sentence connectors (such as therefore, in addition, however). Hinds (1987) believes that thishas a lot to do with the fact that English makes the writer rather than the reader responsiblefor clarity and this is very different from German, Korean, Chinese and Japanese, where thereader is expected to dig out the meaning from a dense text.

More specifically, researchers have become more sensitive to the ways genres are writtenand responded to by individuals acting as members of social groups. Such ideas asCOMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE in applied linguistics, SITUATED LEARNING in education, andSOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM in the social sciences have contributed to a view which placescommunity at the heart of writing and speech. This community-based orientation to literacytherefore focuses on the importance of communicating, and learning to communicate, as anINSIDER. The concept draws attention to the idea that we communicate as members of socialgroups, each with its own norms, categorisations, sets of conventions, and ways of doingthings.

Essentially, the idea of community draws together a number of key aspects of context thatare crucial to the production and interpretation of spoken and written discourse: knowledgeof a cultural and interpersonal situation, knowledge of interlocutors, knowledge of the world,and knowledge of texts and conventions for saying things. This is how Swales puts it:

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 activitiesas running meetings, producing reports, and publicizing their activities. These recurrent classes ofcommunicative 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 widerframeworks, and further assist those individuals with the actualization of their communicative plans andpurposes. (Swales 1998: 20)

Emphasis therefore tends to be on what is ‘shared’ by a community (e.g. Swales 1990),and this has led critics to see the concept as too structuralist, static, and deterministic(e.g. Canagarajah 2002). We obviously need to recognise that membership can imply hugediversity and variation, and our own experience of belonging to groups tells us that theyare not monolithic and conformist but often disparate and divergent. Communities arecomposed of antagonistic groups and discourses, contested theories, peripheral contributors,and occasional members. Nobel Prize winners, influential gatekeepers, and high-profileprofessors interact with, and use the same texts and genres as, student neophytes, researchassistants, and lab rats. They may, however, use them for different purposes, with differentquestions, and with different degrees of engagement.




Nor is it entirely clear what exactly constitutes a community or how we might reconcileLOCAL and GLOBAL interpretations, that is, how we square the idea of large, amorphous anddispersed groups of like-minded individuals with groups who typically work together andsubscribe to common practices of communication (e.g. Killingsworth & Gilbertson 1992).Do we look for communities, for example, in DISCIPLINES (such as applied linguistics), inSPECIALISMS (such as EAP or genre analysis) or DOMAINS (like social sciences)? After all,they are all collectivities of academic participation which help structure and are themselvesstructured by different discourses (Hyland 2008). But despite these problems, the concept ofDISCOURSE COMMUNITY, understood as a group who have texts and practices in common, isimportant as a way of joining writers, texts and readers together. It foregrounds the conceptualframes that individuals use to organise their experience and get things done using language.In particular it offers insights into how writing works in different disciplines and allows us toexplore genre variation systematically.

6. Academic communities and genre differences

Disciplinary genre variation is based on the fact that academic genres represent writers’attempts to anticipate possible negative reactions to their views and establish their claims.To do this they must display familiarity with the practices of their disciplines – encodingideas, employing warrants, and framing arguments in ways that their audience will findmost convincing. Based on their previous experience with texts, writers make predictionsabout how readers are likely to react to their arguments. They know what they are likelyto find persuasive, where they will need help in interpreting the argument, what objectionsthey might raise, and so on. Therefore, this process of audience evaluation helps writers toconstruct an effective line of reasoning. At the same time it points to the ways language isrelated to specific institutional contexts (Hyland 2001a).

In other words, persuasion in academic genres is much like any other field of writing inthat it involves the use of language to relate independent beliefs to shared experience. Writersgalvanise support, express collegiality, resolve difficulties, and negotiate disagreement throughpatterns of rhetorical choices which connect their texts with their disciplines. Most simply,physicists don’t write like philosophers nor lawyers like applied linguists. Writers have toestablish a professionally acceptable voice and an appropriate attitude, both to their readersand to their arguments, and the analysis of genres helps to show how disciplines create a viewof the world through their genre conventions. Communities have different ideas about whatis worth communicating, how it can be communicated, what readers are likely to know, howthey might be persuaded, and so on. In this way, we can see disciplines as spread along acline, with the ‘hard knowledge’ sciences and ‘softer’ humanities at opposite ends, as shownin Table 2.

We can understand the cline in this way. In the sciences, new knowledge is acceptedby experimental proof. Science writing reinforces this by highlighting a gap in knowledge,presenting a hypothesis related to this gap, and then reporting experimental findings tosupport this. The humanities, on the other hand, rely on case studies and narratives whileclaims are accepted on strength of argument. The social sciences fall between these extremes.




Table 2 Continuum of academic knowledge (Hyland 2006).

SCIENCES SOCIAL SCIENCES HUMANITIES←−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→Empirical and objective Explicitly interpretiveLinear and cumulative growth Dispersed knowledgeExperimental methods Discursive argumentQuantitative QualitativeMore concentrated readership More varied readershipHighly structured genres More fluid discourses

While they have partly adopted methods of the sciences, in applying these to human datathey have to give more attention to explicit interpretation.

In practice this means that different disciplines value different kinds of argument anddifferent writing tasks. So in the humanities and social sciences analysing and synthesisinginformation from multiple sources is important while in science and technology subjectsactivity-based skills like describing procedures, defining objects, and planning solutionsare required. It also means that different fields require different genres, so that chemiststend to write lab reports, mathematicians write article surveys, computer scientists writeprogram documentation and social scientists write project reports. We can’t, of course,always generalise about student writing needs in this way as the same genre labels may hidedifferent rhetorical patterns. It does, however, point to the realities of variation and the needto research genres in our students’ target contexts.

7. Some genre comparisons across disciplines

As writers, our knowledge of genres is often only vague and schematic, but it extends beyondthe kind of higher level organisational move structures I’ve been talking about so far tothe more local aspects of expression. Genre knowledge also refers to a shared sense of theconventions of grammar, vocabulary, content, and so on which allow us to express the valuesand identities that relate to our particular discipline.

I now illustrate some of the these disciplinary differences by picking out a few featuresfrom a series of studies I’ve done into published research articles over the past few years.This research is based on a 1.5-million-word corpus of 240 articles from eight disciplines andinterviews with 30 academics.

Essentially, this research describes how writers in different disciplines represent themselves,their work and their readers in very different ways. About 75% of all the features which markauthor visibility in a text – such as self-mention, personal evaluation and explicit interactionwith readers, for example – occur in humanities and social sciences articles. Admittedly thisprobably doesn’t seem too surprising. After all, science attempts to represent the truths itfinds in the lab without the use of rhetoric. It seeks to stamp its claims with a guaranteeof reliable knowledge, which, through induction, experimentation and falsification, give usdirect access to the external world. But the impersonality of scientific discourse is not an




absence of rhetoric but a different kind of rhetoric. It is based, like all writing, on an assumedagreement of how language works. Let’s take a few examples.

7.1 Hedges and boosters

These are the ways we express our commitments to our claims, either conveying cautionand acknowledging others’ views by hedging, or stressing our commitment and closing outalternatives with boosters. HEDGES are devices like possible, might, likely, etc., which withholdcomplete commitment to a proposition, implying that a claim is based on plausible reasoningrather than certain knowledge. BOOSTERS, such as certain, definitely and demonstrate, on the otherhand, allow writers to express certainty in what they say and to mark involvement with thetopic and solidarity with readers.

Both devices represent a writer’s personal intrusion into a text to evaluate material, andthese are two-and-a-half times more common in humanities and social science papers than inthe hard sciences. One reason for this is because there is less control of variables, more diversityof research outcomes, and fewer clear bases for accepting claims than in the sciences. Writerscan’t report research with the same confidence of shared assumptions so papers rely far moreon recognising alternative voices, and arguments have to be expressed more cautiously byusing more hedges. This means that we tend to find more statements like this in the soft fields:

(2) a. Wilson leaves us disappointed, it seems to me, in the sense that his theory is far frombeing general. (Sociology)

b. We tentatively suggest that The Sun’s minimalist style creates an impression ofworking-class language, or restricted code . . . (Applied Linguistics)

c. As far as I know, this account has gone unchallenged. (Philosophy)

But because methods and results are more open to question, writers also work harderto establish the significance of their work AGAINST alternative interpretations. They oftenseek to present their own research more forcefully to create different rhetorical effects anddifferent understandings with readers. Personal credibility, getting behind your arguments, isan important part of creating a convincing discourse in the humanities and social sciencesand this means we find more boosters. So while writers might use hedges to soften criticisms,establish a gap, or present an argument, they often leave readers in no doubt of their owncontribution to the debate. Two comments from informants underline this. First, a sociologistinformant told me:

It’s important to show where you stand. The people who are best known have staked out the extremepositions. The people who sit in the middle and use words like ‘suggest’, no one knows their work.

And a philosopher echoed these sentiments:

I’m very much aware that I’m building a facade of authority when I write. I really like to get behind my workand get it out there. Strong. Committed. That’s the voice I’m trying to promote, even when I’m uncertain Iwant to be behind what I say.




In the hard sciences, positivist epistemologies mean that the authority of the individualis subordinated to the authority of the text and facts are meant to ‘speak for themselves’.Writers often disguise their interpretative responsibilities behind linguistic objectivity andthe less frequent use of hedges and boosters is one way of minimising the researcher’srole to suggest that results would be the same whoever conducted the research. Anotheris the preference for modal verbs over cognitive verbs. This is because modals can moreeasily combine with inanimate subjects to downplay the person making the evaluation and‘objectify’ the research. So instead of finding patterns such as those in (3), where responsibilityfor the evaluation is explicit, we tend to find patterns like (4), which disguise the source of theinterpretation:

(3) a. We suspect that the type of product used in this study may have contributed to theresult. (Marketing)

b. I want to suggest that these principles apply to the choices that people make withinthe legally coercive structures of justice. (Philosophy)

(4) a. For V. trifidum, ANOVA showed a significant increase from L to L’ and FI, whichcould be interpreted as reflecting the dynamics of fungal colonization. (Biology)

b. The deviations at high frequencies may have been caused by the noisemeasurements . . . (Electronic Engineering)

Scientists tend to be concerned with generalisations rather than individuals, so they putgreater weight on the methods, procedures and equipment used rather than the argument.This helps to reinforce a view of science as an impersonal, inductive enterprise and allowsscientists to see themselves as discovering truth rather than constructing it.

7.2 Citation

Citation is another example of how writing works differently across fields. The inclusion ofreferences to the work of other authors is obviously central to academic persuasion. This isbecause it not only helps establish a persuasive framework for the acceptance of arguments byshowing how a text depends on previous work in a discipline, but also as it displays the writer’scredibility and status as an insider. It helps align him or her with a particular community ororientation and confirms that this is someone who is aware of, and is knowledgeable about,the topics, approaches, and issues which currently interest and inform the field. This helpsto explain why I found around 70 citations per paper in a study of 80 research articles in8 disciplines (Hyland 2004c). But because discourse communities see the world in differentways they also write about it in different ways, with two thirds of all the citations in the corpusin the philosophy, sociology, marketing and applied linguistics papers, twice as many as inthe science disciplines.

Basically, the differences reflect the extent writers can assume a shared context with readers.In Kuhn’s (1962) ‘normal science’ model, natural scientists produce public knowledge throughcumulative growth. Problems tend to emerge on the back of earlier problems as results throw




Table 3 Most frequent reporting verbs.

Discipline Most frequent verbs

Philosophy say, suggest, argue, claim, proposeSociology argue, suggest, describe, discuss, noteApplied Linguistics suggest, argue, show, explain, point outMarketing suggest, argue, demonstrate, proposeBiology describe, find, report, show, observeElectrical Engineering show, propose, use, report, describeMechanical Engineering show, report, describe, discussPhysics develop, report, study

up further questions to be followed up with further research, so writers don’t need to reportresearch with extensive referencing. The people who read those papers are often workingon the same problems and are familiar with the earlier work. They have a good idea aboutthe procedures used, whether they have been properly applied, and what results mean. Inthe humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, the literature is more dispersed andthe readership more heterogeneous, so writers can’t presuppose a shared context but have tobuild one far more through citation.

There are also major differences in the ways writers report others’ work, with resultssuggesting that writers in different fields draw on very different sets of reporting verbs to referto their literature. Among the higher frequency verbs, almost all instances of say and 80% ofthink occurred in philosophy and 70% of use in electronics. It turns out, in fact, that engineersshow, philosophers argue, biologists find and applied linguists suggest. The most common formsacross the disciplines are shown in Table 3.

These preferences seem to reflect broad disciplinary purposes. So, the soft fields largelyused verbs which refer to writing activities, like discuss, hypothesise, suggest, argue, etc. Theseinvolve the expression of arguments and allow writers to discursively explore issues whilecarrying a more evaluative element in reporting others’ work:

(5) a. Lindesmith’s (1965) classic work indicated the . . .

b. Davidson defends this claim on the grounds that . . .c. Ballard and Clanchy (2001) argue that . . .

Engineers and scientists, in contrast, preferred verbs which point to the research itself likeobserve, discover, show, analyse, calculate, which represent real-world actions.

(6) a. Edson et al. (1993) showed processes were induced . . .

b. . . . the structure was studied by Mazur [7] and Tech et al. [8] . . .

c. . . . using (4) special process and design, or by adding (5), or removing (6) a mask.




This emphasis on real-world activities helps scientists represent knowledge as proceeding fromimpersonal lab activities rather than from the interpretations of researchers. Two scientistinformants commented on this kind of use:

Of course, I make decisions about the findings I have, but it is more convincing to tie them closely to theresults. (Physics interview)

You have to relate what you say to your colleagues and we don’t encourage people to go out and nail theircolours to the mast as maybe they don’t get it published. (Biology interview)

The conventions of impersonality in science articles thus play an important role in reinforcingan objective ideology by portraying the legitimacy of hard science knowledge as built onsocially invariant criteria. Again, it removes the author from the text to give priority to theunmediated voice of nature itself.

7.3 Self-mention

Another important feature of research writing is the writer’s reference to self: how far theywant to personally intrude into their texts though use of ‘I’ or ‘we’, or use impersonal forms.Presenting a discoursal self is central to the writing process, and we can’t avoid projectingan impression of ourselves and how we stand in relation to our arguments, discipline, andreaders. To some extent we have to see this as a personal preference determined by seniority,experience, confidence, personality, and so on, but the presence or absence of explicit authorreference is a conscious choice by writers to adopt a particular community-situated authorialidentity. My 240 research articles, once again, show broad disciplinary preferences withtwo-thirds of cases in the social sciences and humanities papers (Table 4).

The reason for this is again that the strategic use of self-mention allows writers to claimauthority by expressing their convictions, emphasising their contribution to the field, andseeking recognition for their work (Kuo 1999; Hyland 2001b). It sends a clear indication tothe reader of the perspective from which statements should be interpreted and distinguishesthe writer’s own work from that of others. Successful communication in the soft fields dependsfar more on the author’s ability to invoke a real writer in the text, emphasising their owncontribution to the field while seeking agreement for it.

Table 4 Self-mention in research articles (per 1000 words).

Philosophy 5.5 Physics 4.1Sociology 4.3 Biology 3.4Applied Linguistics 4.5 Mechanical Engineering 1.0Marketing 5.5 Electrical Engineering 3.3

Average 4.9 2.9




(7) a. I argue that their treatment is superficial because, despite appearances, it reliessolely on a sociological, as opposed to an ethical, orientation to develop a response.(Sociology article)

b. I bring to bear on the problem my own experience. This experience contains ideasderived from reading I have done which might be relevant to my puzzlement as wellas my personal contacts with teaching contexts. (Applied Linguistics article)

c. So self-mention can help construct an intelligent, credible, and engaging colleagueby presenting a confident and authoritative authorial self:

Using ‘I’ emphasises what you have done. What is yours in any piece of research.I notice it in papers and use it a lot myself. (Sociology interview)

d. The personal pronoun ‘I’ is very important in philosophy. It not only tells peoplethat it is your own unique point of view, but that you believe what you are saying.It shows your colleagues where you stand in relation to the issues and in relation towhere they stand on them. It marks out the differences. (Philosophy interview)

In the hard sciences, as I noted earlier, researchers are generally seeking to downplaytheir personal role in the research to highlight the phenomena under study, the replicabilityof research activities, and the generality of the findings. Scientists, then, try to distancethemselves from interpretations in ways that are familiar to most EAP teachers. Either usingthe passive voice, as in (8), dummy ‘it’ subjects, as in (9), or by attributing agency to inanimatethings, as in (10).

(8) a. This suggestion was confirmed by the observation that only plants carrying thepAG-I::GUS transgene showed a gain of GUS staining in leaves of clf-2 plants.(Biology article)

b. . . . the ST’s components were demonstrated to relate to the magnetization vectorcomponents . . . (Physics article)

(9) a. It was found that a larger stand-off height would give a smaller maximum shearstrain when subjected to thermal fatigue . . . (Mechanical Engineering article)

b. It is assumed that the circuit simulator which uses this model applies the nodalmethod in the solution process. (Electrical Engineering article)

(10) a. The design model above suggests specific requirements for software tools for thephysical design of microstructures. (Electrical Engineering article)

b. The images demonstrate that the null point is once again well resolved and thatdiffusion is symmetric. (Physics article)

Writers are interested in establishing the objectivity of what they report uncontaminatedby human activity. One of my respondents expressed this view clearly:

I feel a paper is stronger if we are allowed to see what was done without ‘we did this’ and ‘we think that’.Of course we know there are researchers there, making interpretations and so on, but this is just assumed.It’s part of the background. I’m looking for something interesting in the study and it shouldn’t really matterwho did what in any case . . . In theory anyone should be able follow the same procedures and get the sameresults. Of course reputation is important and I often look at the writer before I look at a paper, but theimportant thing is whether the results seem right. (Biology interview)




8. Genre teaching

So what might all this mean in the classroom? Clearly teachers work in widely differingsituations with different resources, constraints, and students, and these differences demandcreativity and flexibility in the ways methods are implemented. While responsive to thediverse contexts in which EAP is taught, however, genre pedagogies are essentially based onthe principle that an awareness of texts facilitates writing development. The key idea, then, isthat writing instruction will be more successful if students are aware of what target discourseslook like.

It is this reproductive element, however, which critics have latched on to. The argumentis that the explicit teaching of genres can straightjacket creativity through conformity torestrictive formulae so that genres might be taught as moulds into which students just pourtheir own content (e.g. Raimes 1991). I have to admit, of course, that there is always somedanger of reifying genres. That we might fail to acknowledge variation and choice and applywhat Freedman (1994: 46) calls ‘a recipe theory of genre’. Obviously this danger exists andmust be guarded against, but there is nothing INHERENTLY prescriptive in a genre approach.I can see no reason why providing students with an understanding of discourse should be anymore prescriptive than, say, providing them with a description of a clause, or of stages in awriting process.

I want to mention four classroom practices in this section which EAP teachers mightfind helpful in employing a genre approach and avoiding prescriptivism: needs analysis, theteaching–learning cycle, comparison tasks, and mixed genre portfolios.

8.1 Needs analysis

First, one clear implication is that we need to base teaching on a study of the texts studentswill need in target contexts rather than our impressions of writing. Genre teaching meanstaking the world outside the writing classroom into account by going beyond grammar andvocabulary to prepare students for their future experiences using the most detailed needsanalysis that time allows.

While all teaching starts with where the students are and takes their backgrounds, languageproficiencies, teaching and learning preferences seriously, the central question for genre-basedinstructors when beginning a course is ‘why are these students learning to write?’. NEEDS

ANALYSIS expresses the fact that literacy acquisition does not occur in a vacuum. It seeks toensure that learning to write is seen both in the context in which it occurs and the contextsin which these skills will be used: it is the means of establishing the HOW and WHAT of acourse. Many EAP teachers struggle to produce courses for their students which take accountof both a PRESENT SITUATION ANALYSIS, concerning information about learners’ currentproficiencies, perceptions and ambitions and a TARGET SITUATION ANALYSIS, the linguisticskills and knowledge they will need to perform competently in their future roles (Dudley-Evans & St John 1998). Helping students move from current to target proficiencies determinesthe objectives, materials, and tasks of a course. Focusing on the features of target genres, andrecycling instruction at increasing levels of difficulty, can be a solution in many cases.




While sometimes seen as a kind of educational technology designed to measure goalsprecisely, NEEDS are always influenced by the preconceptions of the analyst. As a result, theyare likely to be defined differently by different stakeholders, with administrators, subject tutors,literacy instructors and learners perhaps having different views (Hyland 2006). Decisionsabout what to teach and how to teach it are therefore not neutral professional questions butreflect the ideologies of the most powerful parties in any context with important consequencesfor learners. In fact, treating NEED as something existing and measurable is itself an ideologicalstance, and we might reflect on the dangers of conflating students’ needs and institutionaldemands (e.g. Benesch 2001). It is important, then, to involve students in the process ofassessing their options so we can use needs analyses to support learners in taking activeresponsibility for their learning, a point which resonates with the literature on autonomy inlanguage learning.

Reflection on the complexity of needs can also assist us in seeing that teaching writing is notsimply a neutral transfer of skills complying with institutional understandings. Explorationof genres helps learners to see the assumptions and values which are implicit in those genresand helps them understand the relationships and interests in that context. In other words,seeing ‘needs’, contexts, and genres together is both a means of considering writing in a widerframe and a basis for both developing the skills students’ need to participate in academic orprofessional communities and their abilities to critically understand those communities.

8.2 Grammar and writing

A second implication of a genre approach to writing instruction is that it means attending togrammar, but this is not the traditional idea of a grammar, as a system of rules independentof contexts and users. Here GRAMMAR is a resource for producing texts: a repertoire ofavailable choices for achieving particular purposes in particular contexts. A knowledge ofgrammar thus concerns how meanings can be codified in distinct and recognisable ways,shifting writing from the implicit and hidden to the conscious and explicit. In genre-basedwriting instruction this is a top–down procedure, starting with texts, which

first considers how a text is structured and organised at the level of the whole text in relation to its purpose,audience and message. It then considers how all parts of the text, such as paragraphs and sentences, arestructured, organised and coded so as to make the text effective as written communication. (Knapp & Watkins1994: 8)

In learning to write, students also not only begin to understand how to create meanings butalso need to develop an understanding of how language itself works, acquiring a vocabularythey can use to talk about language and its role in texts. But while EAP has tended to focuson grammatical consciousness-raising (e.g. Swales & Feak 2000) and on the elaboration ofgenre moves, methods to develop students’ genre-based grammatical competence have largelycome from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Both approaches privilege communicativepurpose in defining genres and emphasise the formal properties of texts, but SFL seesgenres in the wider rhetorical structures fundamental to various forms of communication




Figure 2 The teaching–learning cycle (Feez 1998: 28).

in a culture, like NARRATION, DESCRIPTION and EXPOSITION, which can combine to formour everyday genres such as RESEARCH PAPERS, LAB REPORTS and RECIPES (Martin 1992).Pedagogically, there are also differences, as SFL genre teaching possesses a more systematicmodel of language than EAP and makes extensive use of a metafunctional grammar basedon the work of Michael Halliday (e.g. Halliday 1994). Many EAP teachers find it useful toborrow from SFL in their classes and one approach seems particularly fruitful. This is theteaching–learning cycle as expressed by Feez (1998) and represented as Figure 2.

The cycle helps us plan classroom activities by showing the process of learning as a series oflinked stages which support learners towards understanding texts. Here the teacher providesinitial explicit knowledge and guided practice, moves to sharing responsibility for developingtexts, and gradually withdraws support until the learner can work alone. The key stages ofthe cycle are:

(i) Setting the context: to reveal genre purposes and the settings in which it is commonlyused. Key questions here are who writes it, with whom, who for, why, etc.? What is therelationship between the writer and reader, are there status or power differences, etc.?

(ii) Modelling: analysing representative samples of the genre to identify its stages and keyfeatures and the variations which are possible. Activities here identify the main tenses,themes, vocabulary, and so on, and teachers might ask students to sequence and labeltext stages, re-organise scrambled paragraphs or re-write unfinished ones.

(iii) Joint construction: involves guided, teacher-supported practice in the genre throughtasks which focus on particular stages or functions of the text. Students here write withconsiderable teacher support, perhaps writing a parallel text.




Figure 3 Scaffolding and collaboration in the learning cycle.

(iv) Independent construction: here students write independently, producing a target textwith the teacher monitoring progress.

(v) Comparing: at this point students relate what they have learnt to other genres andcontexts to understand how genres are designed to achieve particular social purposes.They can compare the target genre with others they know already and how it is linkedto other texts in a situation.

Therefore, each of these stages seeks to achieve a different purpose, and so is associated withdifferent types of classroom activities and teacher–learner roles (Hyland 2004b: 130–140).The cycle is intended to be used flexibly, allowing students to enter at any stage depending ontheir existing knowledge of the genre and to enable teachers further to develop the literacyskills gained by working through a new cycle at a more advanced level of expression.

In terms of pedagogic theory, the teaching–learning cycle draws on modern theories oflearning in giving considerable recognition to the importance of COLLABORATION, or peerinteraction, and SCAFFOLDING, or teacher supported learning. Most obviously, it supportslearners through what Vygotsky called the ‘the zone of proximal development’, or the gapbetween their current and potential performance. Figure 3 shows that as teachers movearound the cycle, direct teacher instruction is reduced and students gradually get moreconfidence and learn to write the genre on their own. In other words, students’ autonomyincreases with their writing competence as they gain greater control over the genre.

8.3 Consciousness-raising

The notion of scaffolding is also implicit in another approach to genre-based writinginstruction known as RHETORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING. Consciousness-raising attempts




to create better writers rather than better texts by encouraging learners to see grammaticalfeatures as ‘the on-line processing component of discourse and not the set of syntactic buildingblocks with which discourse is constructed’ (Rutherford 1987: 104). The writing teacher’s goalis to demystify the genres that matter to students by making their key features salient. This isdone through noticing and reflection, guiding students to explore key lexical, grammatical andrhetorical features of representative samples of target genres, and then to use this knowledgeto construct their own examples of the genre.

Rhetorical consciousness-raising should always involve some kind of focus on texts, andthis can be achieved by asking students to conduct mini-analyses of the genres they have towrite or of their own writing. For example, teachers can ask students to identify where writershave chosen to use or avoid ‘I’ and determine possible reasons for this. A simple task couldinvolve the following steps (Hyland 2004b):

• Mark all occurrences of ‘I’ in a typical paper from the target discipline, count and tabulatethe findings.

• Compare the results with a classmate (preferably in a different discipline). Can you explainany differences?

• Notice how impersonal and personal forms change in the text. Why might this be?• Select FIVE places where ‘I’ can be replaced with a passive. What effect does this have on

the meaning of each sentence?• What main verbs occur most often with ‘I’ in this text? Can you group them in any way?• Do they correspond to the following rhetorical functions?

◦ explaining what was done (‘We interviewed ten teachers from six schools.’)◦ structuring the discourse (‘First, I will discuss the method, then present my results.’)◦ showing a result (‘My findings show that the animation distracted the pupils.’)◦ making a claim (‘I think two factors are particularly significant in this regard.’)

• Now write a report to present your findings.

Comparison tasks are often helpful for raising awareness of language features. For instance,it can be useful to encourage students to compare the advice found in style guides andtextbooks with the actual practices of academic writers. These materials play an importantpart in literacy education at university and students should learn to view their advice critically.Often textbooks rely heavily on intuition and conventional wisdom rather than analysis ofreal language use, and by analysing texts, considering advice, and discussing uses, studentscan work towards a more informed understanding of language use.

8.4 Mixed genre portfolios

Finally, I want to mention Ann Johns’ idea of MIXED GENRE PORTFOLIOS (Johns 1997) as away of raising students’ awareness of text features by encouraging reflection on similaritiesand differences across genres. These portfolios require students to write a range of genresover a semester or course and then collect them together in a folder for assessment togetherwith a brief commentary on each one. Table 5, adapted from Johns, shows a mixed-genreportfolio with some example reflective questions.




Table 5 A genre portfolio with reflective questions.

AN ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY

Why did you organise the essay in this way? What phrases or parts of the essay do you particularlylike? Are you satisfied with this? Why or why not?

A RESEARCH-BASED LIBRARY PROJECT (ALL NOTES, DRAFTS AND MATERIALS LEADING TO THE FINAL

PAPER)What difficulties did you encounter writing this? What did you learn from writing it?

A SUMMARY

Why did you select this particular summary? How is it organised? Why is it organised like this?What are the basic elements of all the summaries you have written?

AN ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Why did you choose this article? How is your review different from the summary? How is itdifferent from your essay? What were the main problems you found in writing this?

AN OVERALL REFLECTION OF THE PORTFOLIO (a letter to the teacher integrating theentries)

Essentially, the purpose of portfolios is to get a more accurate picture of students’ writing,what they can do and how they can vary their language for particular purposes andreaders. But they also have a consciousness-raising function by getting students to thinkabout similarities and differences between the genres they are asked to write. The reflectionquestions encourage them to see how language varies for particular purposes and readers.

9. Conclusion

I have tried to say something about genre and disciplinary variation in writing, suggestingsomething of what genre analysis can tell us about writing in the disciplines and how it mightbe a useful approach for teachers preparing students for writing at university. I have arguedthat an understanding of the ways language is used to create meanings in writing empowersstudents by offering them ways to analyse texts and reflect on the workings of language,and that it gives teachers the tools to understand writing and give more robust and targetedsupport for learners. Because they emphasise the importance of making known what is tobe learnt and assessed, genre approaches give teachers a more central role in preparingindividuals to write in their disciplines.

The fact that we need to consider community as well as genre in our instruction underlinesthe fact that writing isn’t just words on a page or the activity of isolated individuals. Itis ALWAYS a social practice, influenced by cultural and institutional contexts. For teachers,genre offers us a tool to analyse texts in ways that we can distinguish regularities of structureand form, showing how language typically works within particular disciplines. By becomingresearchers of the specific genres our students will need in their fields of study we canhelp them understand the reasons for language choices and scaffold their effective use ofthem.




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KEN HYLAND is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Academic and ProfessionalLiteracies at the Institute of Education. Before coming to London, he taught overseas for 26 years,mainly in Asia and Australasia, and has published over 130 articles and 12 books on languageeducation and academic writing. His most recent publications are English for Academic Purposes: Anadvanced resource book (Routledge, 2006), Feedback in second language writing (edited with Fiona Hyland;Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Academic discourse (Continuum, 2008). He is co-editor of theJournal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier).


genre and academic writing in the disciplines

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