（英语语言文学专业论文）体裁分析法及其在二语教学中的运用.pdf

内容摘要 体裁分析及体裁教学法是在 20 世纪 80 年代得到发展的此后体裁分析的 教学运用主要集中在旨在提高母语为英语的学生使用专门用途英语写作水平的 专业写作课上j. swales 对科技论文的体裁结构特征的分析是体裁分析领域最 重要的成果之一此外还有许多体裁分析者对法律语篇商务语篇广告语篇 等从体裁结构与语言特征的角度做了全面的分析 这些体裁分析的研究成果都能 很大程度地帮助体裁使用者们写出更好的语篇 体裁分析在外语学习和教学中有更广泛的运用本文认为在外语教学中引 入体裁的观念和体裁分析的成果 可以在体裁理解和体裁写作两个层面上帮助二 语学习者习得运用特定体裁知识实现交际目的的能力 比其在母语教学中的运用 更有价值和意义 体裁教学在外语教学中更重要的一个目的是教会学生体裁分析 理论的基本原理和分析方法并鼓励学生能独立的运用这些原理和方法进行分 析由于现在国内对体裁分析法还停留在理论介绍阶段实际运用还很少因此 本文有针对性的进行了一次教学实验并提出了一些教学意见和建议 关键词体裁体裁分析法交际能力体裁意识 abstract ever since the genre movement began to engage theoretical and practical attentions in the early 1980s, the application of genre analysis to language teaching has been mainly restricted to esp in l1 environment. j. swaless research findings with scientific papers, the part of introduction of them in particular, have been considered as the most remarkable breakthrough in the domain. since then a lot of analytical efforts have been made with may other academic and professional genres, and have succeeded, to some degree, in helping those novice writers develop effective writing strategies of the genres concerned. this dissertation gives an overall introduction of genre and genre analysis theory and previous findings, and tries to adopt a new dimension of application to ga approach which is aimed at facilitating the approach to guide both genre-perception and genre-production in our l2 learners. a purposely designed pedagogical experiment is made among a certain group of l2 learners, which hopes to shed some light on any further research or future pedagogical practice. introducing the perspective of genre and genre analysis into l2 classrooms can contribute to the cultivation of genre consciousness in advanced l2 learners and better prepare them to be qualified genre users in the target language. 1 introduction genre, a term which was once described as to be dealt with trepidation, attracts academic and practical interests in that it appears accountable for many problems that cause the failure in language teaching and learning, but on the other hand, it is very evasive and a difficult concept to identify with. genres dealt with in literary reviews, and in guidebooks for novice writers, in linguistics, applied linguistics in particular, are more or less related concepts, but assume different focus of attention. this paper will introduce and draw on the swalesian theory of genre analysis, trying to explore into a domain that has been less written on, i.e. how such a genre-aided approach fits into the l2 education environment and where necessary adaptive changes are needed, and what an outcome will be. compared to the traditional focus on writing skills in ga-guided teaching, this paper looks into the possibility of cultivating the l2 learners overall text competence and genre awareness, which is overall in that it has a favorable influence on both reading and writing performance in the target language. by adopting the theoretical framework of previous ga, which is not a complex one, and more importantly, by borrowing from various previous experimental patterns and pedagogical practices, an experiment is designed and carried out. it turns out that l2 learners of an advanced academic level, their grammatical knowledge and vocabulary being enough, do need further instructions to achieve competence in both text reception and production, and genre might be a right place to begin with. this dissertation paper falls into five chapters. chapter one sets up the theoretical background for the whole paper by giving a detailed analysis of the concept of genre and its defining features, genre analysis and its previous applications in a writing classroom. previous attempts to facilitate ga in guiding native writers have also been acknowledged, so as to shed some light on its further application in l2 context. hence chapter two is a quest into the possibility of introducing present ga-aided teaching approaches into our college english and into necessary variations to be made accordingly. chapter three introduces how language input and output of genres could be interwoven together in l2 classroom instructions to help the learners acquire a genre consciousness. chapter four has the focus of this paper, introducing an experiment purposefully tailored to test on the hypothesis made in previous chapters. some tentative conclusions are reached and suggestions made, hoping to shed some light on the future application of its kind. the last chapter focuses on the teaching 2 implications of ga for l2 education, and suggestions are made on teaching materials, classroom instructions, curriculum arrangement, and on learners self-motivated effort toward an internalized genre competence. 3 chapter one genre and genre analysis 1.1 genre and related categories during the last two decades of the past century, genre and genre analysis have achieved considerable popularity among theoretical researchers and educators. in north america and australia, a so-called genre-based teaching approach has been advocated in writing classes at professional schools and universities, and some important insights have been available from their pedagogical experiments. in china, the approach has also found some advocators since the late 1990s. a lot has been introduced, including the basic rationale of the approach and its application abroad, though no attempt to apply it to our college english class has been made. in order to have a comprehensive overview of the approach, and of its adaptability to our requirements, we may first of all have a brief review of previous attempts to define genre. 1.1 .1 how has genre being defined? there has always been an urge to define and classify whenever genres are analyzed and ga findings are applied to education. ever since the 1980s when genre analysis began to win academic interests, analysts have been sharing a view that genres should be analyzed and classified by the communicative purposes they fulfill. most previous defining attempts have privileged communicative purpose in their definitions, among which swales has been the most commonly cited one: a genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. these purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. this rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. (swales 1990:58) just as is suggested in the above definition, it is widely accepted that genres are goal-directed communicative events, and best considered from the perspective of what they are used to do. sales letter as a genre is generally used to push sales of certain commodities or services, though many sub-purposes may exist. analysts may disagree concerning to what a degree can we depend on communicative purpose as an overall criterion, but they all share such a view that purposes of genres interact with the formal features of texts at both micro-structural and macro-structural level. this 4 consensus sets the base for all divergent schools of genre analysis. based on swales definition, bhatia (1993) argues for more consideration for the genre users individual intent in genre construction, and he adds a new element of the private exploitation of each user of a genre, of how a user achieves his own communicative goal within the domain of “socially recognized purposes”. bhatias contribution is that in his definition, the production of genre allows for each users personal tactics in use and becomes a dynamic process. it is in his definition that psychological factors are given adequate consideration as playing an important role. but the addition of this personal intention further complicates the process of identification of the communicative purpose and makes the concept of communicative purposes even more difficult to get at. besides the above two, other analysts like miller (1984) and inger (2001) have all made their contributions to the identification of genres, but just as inger comments in his genre identification and communicative purpose, advances in such studies have not come from increased sophistication about the categorization of genres or any robust criteria, but from studies that have deepened and widened our understanding of the roles of discourse in our society and thus will lead to further flourishing of its study. it is understandable that academic focus on this issue will continue to bring about new findings, and a review of the previous researches does not aim at clearing up a theoretical background or setting a guideline, but rather to provide a room for furthering the academic movement. this paper, however, never attempts to settle this academic dispute with any robust definition, but rather to draw the most on all of the previous findings. hence the paper takes, as its theoretical foundation, the fact that to analyze a genre, we have to identify a main communicative purpose, and then analyze all the rhetorical moves involved to achieve such a purpose. 1.1.2 discourse community for anyone who wants to conceptualize language use from the perspective of genre, a key element to be introduced is discourse community. to analyze genre uses and thereafter to shed some light on language teaching, we must pay due attention to this important concept that swales defines as follows (1990:23): “discourse communities are socio-rhetorical networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals . genres belong to discourse communities, not to individuals, other kinds of grouping or to wider speech communities” from above we may conclude that any genre-related behavior, be it production or 5 perception, is collectively conditioned. genre in some sense is a collective noun, referring to a class of communicative events, which share some certain features in common among the class, and thus can be identified as belonging to a same genre. generally speaking, what we read and hear everyday, and perceive actively or passively, all belong to certain genre as an instantiation of that group of genre, and bear certain mark on them, which shows their identification. the members, qualified as proficient users of a genre, constitute the discourse community of it, and their continuous uses of the genre endow it with life and ever-changing value. for instance, a restaurant menu, an insurance policy, or a status informing email from a recruiting office, or the weather forecast we hear every morning, can all be classified to some genre types with great ease, at least apparently so. discourses like these, written or spoken, are used in plain forms of language, simple both linguistically and cognitively - language used is simple and general, and the purposes they serve are almost unitary, thus are barely challenging for cognition. though serving for a huge discourse community, genre of menu is not difficult to master, with easily identifiable cognitive and structural features. in contrast, some other genre types, with complex structural conventions, and cognitively more demanding errands to fulfill, like those writings for academic and professional purposes, are a greater burden on the users, those non-native users in particular. discourse community has its genre-specific discoursal expectations, which regulate the genre use of all the members. discoursal expectations vary discipline by discipline in complexity, and in the extent to which they are obligatory for the genre users. when it comes to academic writing, generic conventions are generally strictly followed, and some of them have even been considered as evidences of stronger academic and social strengths, reliability and membership. it is understandable, then, that writers may spare no time and efforts to find out all the expectations of the community so as to be a member of it. it is not easy for native genre users, not to mention those l2 learners, who have to struggle against not only linguistic barrier in general, but also a higher barrier set by the professional circle he aspires to participate. its a pity that our english education at senior level, up to now, has not made significant progress in helping the prospective users of genres in english. 1.1.3 identification of genre theorists have proposed diverse standards for the identification of genre, and for the recognition of discourse community membership. for example, halliday and hasan in their language, context and text (1989) rely on the existence and arrangement of obligatory structural elements for identification and classification of 6 genres. so an instance of a genre should bear a mark of the genre in question existence of certain elements, as if there exists a structural formula for each genre. halliday and hasan define the formula as consisting of three variables of field, tenor and mode. however relying on structural features for genre identification is not without problems either. to begin with, it adopts a purely formal criterion without allowing for the contexts and cognitive factors. a genre analysis of text use should be descriptive, finding out how the generic features, structural feature being one of the most significant, interact with the fulfillment of communication. their reliance on formulaic elements makes the definition prescriptive. secondly, it will result in an extremely exhausting classification since any minor difference results in different categorization. as a result, their defining criterion has seldom been referred to in ga researches. as can be found in swales definition, the genres and genre uses are defined with a criterion of shared communicative purposes. our use of language abounds in communicative events, and the principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is the shared set of communicative purposes. he also admits that instances of a genre can differ in the degree of prototypicality of the shared set of purposes. for example the genre of sales letter is used to promote sales of products and services, and a typical instance of the genre might be a business pre-offer with prices, quality standards and some other terms specified. a less typical use of the genre might be a throwaway distributed in front of a new beauty salon, which kindly reminds you that you might need better skin cream and facial service for the summer. but basically both of the two share the communicative purpose of selling something. however swales criterion also has its weakness, since a genre is always multi-purposed, and the set of purposes should not be conceptualized as aligning in a linear order, weighing equally in importance. they are complexly layered and one or more of them might assume more attention and focus from the author. so such a preference falls into the category of “private intention”. a thousand expert users of a genre can achieve a thousand individual intents under a flag of the shared purposes”. the fact is genre analysis deals with live language in use, and in authentic communication contexts, there is no limit to the potential of communicative power of a language unit. take the status informing email in response to a job application as an example. the email will include, at first appreciation of the applicants interest in the job, and then, be it a “bad news”, getting the receiver prepared for the news by introducing the current situation, and at last, as if landing on a cushion, the final 7 notice will not be too unpleasant. usually there will be something about “future chances” like “ will keep you in the waiting list”. such is the established framework of the genre, which must be born in the mind of those key members of this discourse community, namely those human resource officers. we may further to say that the existence of such a genre, its conventions and features depend on the community members, and the genre may change, survive or multiply as they continue to use. just as the talent market changes everyday, the message those members intend to convey via such letters may change as well. the defining criterion, a set of shared communicative purposes, of genre is a convenient but evasive one. the reliability of communicative purpose as a guideline for genre identification has remained unsettled, and many have been written on this. (john swales, 1990) currently this criterion is not scientific enough to serve for any rigorous and exhaustive classification, but for the purpose of this paper, it is still the best possible solution. 1.1.4 some remaining issues concerning the classifying criterion, there are two points to make clear. first, the set of communicative purposes shapes a genre and provides a schematic structure of the genres features and conventions, but such a formal schema is not prescriptive or obligatory. secondly, those expert users of a genre, who are also the insider members of a discourse community, have the privilege to develop new norms when the old ones cannot meet their communicative expectations. concerning the generic features, we also need to know that genres are conventionalized, but not without flexibility. instances of the same genre will show certain diversity as a result of the different cultural factors, text variables and individual endeavors to achieve originality, etc. we know that one important rationale of systematic and functional grammar is that, cultural and situational conte