Cinnabar and Alabaster

24-5. rationale for the development of the genre approach was australian theorists' (halliday, martin et al) concerns about the exclusivity perpetuated by traditional approaches; the hope was that explicit instruction in literary practice would grant entrance to traditionally excluded students into the in-crowd of those already or likely to become familiar w/it.
27. for them, genre represented "a staged, goal-oriented social process": "genres are referred to as social processes because members of a culture interact with each other to achieve them; as goal oriented because they have evolved to get things done; and as staged because it usually takes more than one step for participants to achieve their goals" (martin et al.); explicitness = access (& = "teaching grammar again")

all the tricky details
genre & register:
28. register = "a language 'variety according to use'" (as contrasted to dialect as "variety 'according to the user'"); register varies by situation; situation is comprised of field ("what is going on... the area of operation of the language activity"), mode (primarily writing vs. speaking), & tenor ("'the relations among participants'" and registers along this dimension vary in terms of formality"); martin's model is 3-tiered: "it consists of genre, register, and language. all three strata are interpreted semiotically, that is, as systems for making meaning"; there's also a difference between "connotative and denotive semiotic systems"; "language has a phonology and therefore has means of realisation. genre and register, on the other hand, are connotive systems, systems which rely on other systems to realise their meaning. they rely on language." (emphasis added)
29. "the role of genre as the content plane for register is 'to constrain the possible combinations of field, mode, and tenor variables used by a given culture'" (martin); "this means that no culture allows for all possible combinations"; "the principle of constraint is extended to all three levels from genre to register and register to langauge."
functional grammar:
30. "all languages [are] organised around two kinds of meaning: the ideational or reflective, and interpersonal or active"; "to understand the world around us...and to act on others in it....the third component is the textual, the function of which is to create text" (<--halliday-->); "a functional grammar is based on the correlation between the categories of the situation...field, tenor and mode and those of the semantic system...ideational, interpersonal and textual--so that 'the field is reflected in the experiential meanings of the text, the tenor in the interpersonal meanings and the mode in the textual meanings"; "people communicate in terms of the ability of speakers to make predictions which operate from the context to langauge and from the language to context"
31. basic grammar our students don't know, which is ridiculous: phrases/clauses include (1) process, (2) participant, & (3) circumstance. usually these are shown by (1) verbsies (2) nounsies & (3) the "adverbial group or prepositional phrase." i'm having burke flashbacks, but w/less alcohol & more sentence-diagramming
genre analysis:
33. "genres differ in terms of purpose and structure"--a narrative won't look like "factual genres" whose "purpose is to interpret the world around us"; each has diff. recognizeable necessary stages.

genre pedagogy:
35. in the classroom "the genre approach" looks like "a cycle known as the curriculum cylcle or 'wheel'....divided into a number of stages with the aim of developing first, learner awareness of genres. learners were presented with models of different genres which were analysed in terms of purpose, structure and language. from the modelling stage learners moved to a negotiating stage which involved joint negotiation with the teacher....the next stage was the independent construction stage which involved preparation, drafting, conferencing and evaluating activities"
36. its problems included the model being hard to understand or apply, for teachers, and being organized counterintuitively, starting each genre with new knowledge rather than building cognitively on the old, for students. a proposition to better these "teaching-learning experiences" called for "chang[ing] the orientation of the approach from product to process," for a "more flexible interpretation of genre," for emphasizing teaching grammar, & for "involving learners with the concrete world and its phenomena first and then moving towards the abstract"

pros (p. 39):
(1) emphasis on "relevance in terms of the needs of students and relevance for the context";
(2) "the explicitness" often critiqued is actually good b/c it "provides the learner with a framework within which different aspects of genre can be slotted" to "scaffold" learing from;
(3) "genre awareness both in terms of the types of genres that are relevant and their characteristic features is essential so that the student is aware of the expectations of the context in which writing is practiced, and the purposes that different genres serve in society and cultlure. also, an awareness of language as a resource for making meaning and demonstrating how this resource can be used for the realisation of selected meaning is important"; &
(4) genre analysis gives teachers a pragmatic framework for "provid[ing] feedback on students' writing" & can allow "students [to] be involved in the genre analysis of their own writing" (doesn't really say how)

cons (p. 39):
(1) "the theoretical basis...requires both the teacher and learner to be engaged in linguistic analyses which requires...the relevant metalanguage, together with an understanding of the concepts of grammar which operates at three different levels..." &
(2) "it requires familiarity with linguistic concepts such as cohension and thematic structure"; "it is difficult to implement because of the conceptual demands that it makes on those who use it."