Genre analysis: Is it an easy task?

Amairi Hadjira
Ammour Naima
Université de Mustapha Stambouli, Mascara

Abstract

This paper reports on the importance of computer programs in analysing academic genres. English is an important language. It is a vital means of scientific communication which is so essential for sharing ideas. To achieve this sharing, the learner needs to be familiar with the rhetorical and the discoursal features of written English so that he will be able to adapt and acquire a wide spectrum of new genres. However, writing effectives genres is a very difficult task for non-native students since it requires the mastery of the textual organization and other key linguistic features .Unfortunately, the English language teacher is obliged to teach his learners those genres that are used in their discourse community and the appropriate terminology and vocabularies related to them. At the beginning, teachers and corpus analysts used to collect genres read and manually analyze them but with the advance of technology, the analysis is carried out with the help of computers and Concordancers such as Wordsmith Tools. This program gives a helping hand to English teachers in designing courses and selecting their teaching materials. To concretize things, an example of a study is given. It tries to compare forty abstracts published in Applied Linguistics and Language Learning and Technology journals. The research aims to explore the different rhetorical structures and moves occurrences in research articles abstracts. The selection of journals is based on Journal Citation Reports. The two journals have a higher impact factor. They are among the top twenty linguistics’ journals in the world. Authors’ names and titles are chosen randomly then deleted. The content of abstracts is systematically selected. Clearly, to balance and harmonize the corpus, empirical research type abstracts are used. In addition, Dos Santos’ model is employed for the analysis. To achieve better results, the study is done by analyzing the meaning of each sentence using the concordance of the key words such as problem, result, suggestions so that the context in which they occur will be known. Consequently, the identification of moves becomes easier. So, the results show the utility of computer programs in facilitating discourse analysis and helping practitioners in vocabulary teaching and improving the students’ academic writing. As a conclusion, the use of Concordancers in genre analysis is absolutely a great change.

.Keywords: abstract, article, Dos Santos, journal, move.

Introduction

An abstract is a crucial element in any academic work. It is widely used in journals, especially the commercial ones wherein a good abstract writing is considered as the readers’ and clients’ motivator to the whole article. Salager-Meyer (1990) noted that the abstract is a concise and accurate representation of the contents of a document. A well-prepared abstract enables its reader to quickly survey the basic content of a document. Moreover, it enables him to understand the key points, the concepts and the terminology discussed and used in the research. It summarizes documents. Therefore, it is difficult to be written. It is a quite complicated task to review a research in or less than 150 words. In this study, an example of genre analysis is done. Retrieved abstracts of articles published in an international journal called Applied Linguistics (Oxford Journals) are compared with abstracts in Language Learning &Technology.

Theoretical Background

Genre Definition

In the last decade, a deal of attention has been given to the notion of genre and its application in language teaching and learning. The word genre is attractive but its definition is fuzzy. The issue is that it is used in different areas of study such as folklore, literary studies, linguistics, rhetoric, etc. One initial way of tackling the issue is to examine what scholars have actually said about genres in a number of fields.

Genre in Three Traditions

In her article entitled Genre in Three Traditions: an Implication for ESL (1996: 693-695), Sunny Hyon explained and compared the appropriate genre-based theories. She claimed that there are three different paths to the study of genre. These three focal areas are (a) ESP, (b) North American New Rhetoric studies and, (c) Australian systemic functional linguistics.

1. ESP Analysis

In the field of English for Specific Purposes, an English language teaching approach, scholars framed genres as oral and written text types, which are defined by their formal properties as well as by their communicative purposes within social context. Swales (1990) gave his conception of the word ‘genre’:

“A genre comprises a class of communicative purposes, these purposes are recognized by the expert members of the present discourse community thereby constitute the rational for the genre. This rational shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences choice of content and style.” (Kinoksilapatham, 2007: 23)

So, genres are texts that contain a number of communicative purposes that address a certain audience such as teachers, students, etc. The shared set of communicative purposes give a different genre; however, minor changes or modifications help to distinguish sub-genres (Bhatia, 2002: 162).

In brief, in ESP tradition, genres are described as communicative events that are composed of communicative purposes, various structures, styles, content and intended audience. ESP scholars and Practitioners¹ pay much attention on the formal characteristics of genres and less attention to functions of texts and their surrounding social context.

2. New Rhetoric Studies

Miller’s article “Genre as a Social Action” shaped New Rhetoric theory. According to rhetorical scholars, there are two important elements: context and genre (Swales, 1990: 42). A rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish. The definition of genre is based on the description of the situational context and the social purposes or actions that these genres fulfil within such a context institutional, ideological² or physical (Johns, 2010: 9). Consequently, rhetoricians follow ethnographic methods in their description of the academic or the professional setting surrounding the actions texts perform within such situations.

Miller has furthered the discussion on genre analysis. New ideas have been introduced such as the goals of genres. She claimed that the appropriate definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or form of discourse but on the action it is used to achieve. In this way, genre has been considered as a tool used by people to arrive at their goals and ends.

3. Australian Genre Theory

In this tradition, Australian or Sydney school, linguists pay more attention on the concept of genre. It has been studied by functionalists .The Australian tradition has developed independently from ESP and New Rhetoric traditions. It is based on the theory of language known as a systemic functional linguistics³, developed by the British-born scholar Halliday. Unlike ESP and New Rhetoric scholars, Australian genre theorists have focused mainly on primarily and secondary genres with little attention to university and professional writings (Hyon, 1996: 654).

Genre studies raise many questions and controversies (Hyon 1996). One issue is how the word ‘genre ‘relates to ‘register’ (Allison, 1999: 144). However, a clear distinction has been made. Couture (1986) differentiated between registers and genres. According to him , ‘registers’ being used when we are talking about the lexico- grammatical and discoursal-semantic patterns associates with situations and ‘genres‘ being used when we are talking about membership of culturally recognizable categories. One genre may include different registers (Lee, 2001:46).While some scholars work mainly with one or the other term, many treat the concepts as complementary.

To sum up, ESP analysis focuses on move organization. The situational conditions and the contextual features have a great importance in New Rhetoric, whereas the Sydney school scholars base their analysis and pedagogy on the description of the lexico-grammatical features of genres. Here one can say that these traditions are complementary. A theory of genre is needed that base its analysis on the description of move organization, the contextual features, as well as the lexico-grammatical characteristics.

Genre Analysis

Genre analysis is the study of a situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalized academic or professional settings, whether in terms of typification of rhetorical action as in Miller (1984), regularities of staged, goal oriented social processes as in Martin (1987) or in terms of consistency of communicative purposes as in Swales (1990), (Bhatia,2002:22). Kuhn (1970) asserted that academia, as a community with its own culture, encompass a set of written genres that maintain conventionalized forms and functions (e.g., Ph. D. dissertations, abstracts, book reviews, research papers). In that respect, genre analysts have been concerned with the problem of how to provide inexperienced members (who have little or no academic literacy in English) with the information they need to participate in academia.

Definition of “Move”

The term ‘move’ is basically used in ESP approach, which is based on move analysis. That approach was first introduced by Swales. This latter defines move as a semantic unit, which serves his purposes for genre analytic approach (Martin, 2000:7). Moreover, in his article called “The Textual Organization of Research Papers Abstracts”, Dos Santos (1996) said, “A move has to be considered as a genre stage which has a particular minor communicative purpose of the genre” (Prabripoo, 2009:19).

Move Analysis

Move analysis is a top-down⁴ approach used most often by applied linguists for the analysis of discourse structure. Genre analysis using rhetorical move was originally developed by Swales who aims at describing the communicative purposes of texts by dividing them into discourse units (Kanoksilapatham, 2007: 23). In move analysis, the researchers analyse texts’ moves and/or the sub moves that are functional units, which together fulfil the overall communicative purpose of the genre (Ibid). Connor & Mauraen (1999) emphasised that some move types occur more frequently than other in a genre and can be described as conventional. The moves which are less frequent are optional ones.

Abstract

Bhatia (1993) claimed that the American Psychological Institution defines abstract as an abbreviated accurate representation of the content of a document preferably prepared by its author. The abstract is, thus a short but important piece of writing. It orients what the author has done as well as where the writer is scholarly placed. (Kachru & Nelson, 2006: 299)There are three types of abstracts. Each one is identifiable by its internal purpose: descriptive, informative, and critical abstracts (Ruban, et al., 2007: 234-235

Abstracts’ Move Analysis Models

Several scholars have investigated the textual organization of different genres like Swales (1990), Salager-Meyer (1990), Bhatia (1993, 1996), Kaplan (1994), Dos Santos (1996) and Candlin (1999).

Dos Santos’ Model

In his study on applied linguistics’ abstracts, Do Santos claimed that an abstract contains five moves. These moves, he added, are released through a number of sub-moves. A move may consist of three or four moves. His model is elaborated in the following lines:

Move 1 ─ Situating the research

Sub-move l A – Stating current knowledge

and/or

Sub-move 1 B – Citing previous research

and/or

Sub-move 1 C – Extended previous research

and/or

Sub-move 2- Stating a problem

Move 2 ─ Presenting the research

Sub-move l A – Indicating main features

and/or

Sub-move 1 B – Indicating main purpose

and/or

Sub-move 2- Hypothesis raising

Move 3 ─ Describing the methodology

Move 4 ─ Summarizing the results

Move 5─ discussing the research

Sub-move 1 – Drawing conclusions

and/or

Sub-move 2 – Giving recommendations

Methodology and Data Collection

Research Questions

This study tries to answer the following questions:

1. What moves are found in articles abstracts published in Oxford Journals, journal of Applied Linguistics?

2- What moves are found in English abstract articles published Language Learning & Technology?

3- Do both journals differ from each other?

4- Do they differ from Santos’ move pattern?

Hypotheses

The research is designed to test the following hypotheses:

3. Scholars in AL mention the topic, the purpose, the methodology, and the conclusion.

4. Scholars in LLT mention the topic, the purpose, the methodology, and the conclusion.

5. Both journals follow Santos’ model (Santos’ model and academia are globalised).

6. Both journals omit the sub move of showing results.

Description of the Corpus

This study attempts to show move organization and frequency in research articles abstracts. This research analyzed 40 abstracts from two journals: Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology, twenty abstracts from each journal.

The name of each journal	Number of abstracts
Applied Linguistics	20
Language Learning and Technology	20
Total	40

Table 1: Articles Abstracts from Both Journals.

Selection of Journals

The selection of journals is based on Journal Citation Reports (2009): Science edition of journals reports which covers about 6,166 leading international science journals. A number of quantitative measures such as a total cites, impact factor, cited half- life immediacy index and the total articles used for ranking, evaluating, categorizing and comparing journals. Journals are chosen according to their higher impact factor. They are among the top twenty linguistics’ journals in the world.

1. Applied Linguistics

Oxford Journals is a division of Oxford University Press which is the department of Oxford University. It publishes about 230 journals belonging to different disciplines. It is publishing for more than 500 years old. Applied Linguistics is one of Oxford Journals. It is a journal that publishes issues related to language. It provides articles of higher quality. The articles are edited by professional applied linguists such as Ken Hyland and Jane Zuengler.

2. Language Learning & Technology

Language Learning & Technology is an effective journal. It began the publication in July 1997. It is exclusively an e-journal⁵. It is published three times per year (February, June, and October). It contains well organized and highly effective articles. Methodology and publication conditions such as originality are listed on the official website of the journal. The stuff of the journal consists of experienced scholars in the field of second language education and computer-assisted learning.

Analysis Tools

The analysis tools are:

3. The researcher is the only coder

4. The Criteria for an abstract organization focused on the communicative purposes which are developed by Santos (1996). They are used to identify an abstract move patterns.

5. A coding scheme is designed by the researcher which used in coding.

4. A Spreadsheet is used to collect all the coding results

5. A Concord program is used mainly by writing the key words such problem, aim, method, etc. so that the context in which they occur will be known.

Data Analysis

Results

Under this title, the researcher presents the results of move analysis which is carried out on research article abstracts. The table 1 pictures move occurrences in Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology journals. The table is about move frequency in both journals.

	Applied Linguistics		Language Learning & Technology
FIVE MOVES	Frequency	%		Frequency	%
Move 1 : Situating the research	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1A: Situating current knowledge	12	60		20	100
And /or	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1B: Citing previous research	08	40		04	20
And /or	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1C: Extended previous research	04	20		01	05
And /or
Sub-move 2: Stating the problem	07	35		06	30
Move 2: Presenting the research	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1A: Indicating main features	1	05		0	0
And /or	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1B: Indicating main purpose	14	70		12	60
And/or	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 2: Hypothesis raising	0	0		0	0
Move 3 : Describing the methodology	18	90		17	85
Move 4 : Summarizing the results	13	65		17	85
Move 5 : Discussing the research	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 1: Drawing conclusions	12	60		10	50
And /or	–	–		–	–
Sub-move 2: Giving recommendations	06	30		05	25
Total	20	100		20	100

Table 2: Move Occurrences in AL and LLT Journals

The cut off frequency of 60% is the measure of move stability. A conventional move must occur in 60% of the appropriate sections in the corpus. If the frequency falls below 60%, it is considered optional. So, to see if a particular move is conventional or optional, the frequencies of each move in each section must be recorded to determine if a particular move occurred frequently enough to be considered as a conventional one. (Kanoksilapatham, 2005: 272). Following the percentage of 60%, the conventional moves in Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology are detected. The following table shows the results of that detection:

	Applied Linguistics			Language Learning &Technology
FIVE MOVES	Frequency	% %%&%ù% %	Frequency		%
Move 1 : Situating the research	–	–	–		–
Sub-move 1A: Situating current knowledge	12	60	20		100
Move 2 : Presenting the research	–	–	–		–
Sub-move 1B: Indicating main purpose	14	70	12		60
Move 3 : Describing the methodology	18	90	17		85
Move 4: Summarizing the Results	13	65	17		85
Sub-move 1: Drawing conclusions	12	60	10		50

Table 3: Conventional Moves in AL and LLT Journals

1. Applied Linguistics

• In move 1, the first sub-move –situating current knowledge– is conventional.

• In move 2, the sub-move -indicating main purposes– occurred 70% which is an enough percentage to be considered an obligatory sub- move.

• The move called describing the methodology is conventional because it is mentioned 18 times or 90% of the total number of abstracts.

• Move 4 -summarising the results- is conventional. It occurs 13 times.

• In move 5, the first sub-move is common. It occurs 12 times.

2. Language Learning & Technology

• In move 1, the first sub-move – situating current knowledge –is conventional. It is mentioned 20 times
• In move 2, the sub-move –indicating main purposes – is an obligatory sub-move since it has been mentioned 12 times.
• The so-called describing the methodology move occurred 17 times or 85%. It is a conventional move and;
• There is another obligatory move. Move 4 –summarising the results – mentioned 85% of the total number of abstracts.
• In move 5, the first sub-move is less common. It occurs 10 times only.

Discussion of the First and Second Findings

in this present study, most of Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology abstracts contain the five moves that occur in Santos move patterns. This may explain that in international journals, an abstract writing is totally important just like other genres. In the international journal writers tend to vary moves within their abstracts. They are considered as the users’ motivators to the whole paper. They are informative, short and straight to the point. They focus on the topic, purpose(s), methodology, result(s) and conclusion. The majority of moves have an equal importance.

Discussion of the Third Finding

Results show that AL and LLT abstracts follow Dos Santos model. It has been claimed that a move can be realized through one move or a set of sub-moves. For instance, move 1 is realized through four sub-moves which are stating current knowledge, citing previous research, extending previous research and stating a problem. Applied Linguistics and Language Learning and Technology journals follow Dos Santos’ model (1996) because the majority of abstracts include the five moves. The results of this research are comparable with those found in Santos’ study.

The similarity between both journals and Dos Santos model indicates the extent to which academia is globalised. This movement of globalization touches all domains: linguistics, economy, business, policy, etc. It aims at the use of one international system of communication.

So, a globalised model of English writing will facilitate knowledge exchange between nations. It seems that Dos Santos model is chosen because it is the one which is best suited to writers’ scholarship and business. It is informative and convincible.

This study has slight differences compared with Santos’ study, namely moves order. The findings reveal a different

Discussion of the Fourth Finding

_{The move of –summarizing the results-which is usually used in stating the main findings the studies refutes the last hypothesis. It occurs frequently though it is hypothesized that it has been deleted in international abstracts. In both journals, authors state their findings. This is probably due to the need to show the validity of the experimental procedures they used. Additionally, information on the finding will benefit the researchers, especially who have not the access to the whole copy, make comparisons between different studies. The move of summarizing the results is mentioned in both journals by means of a sentence initiated with a noun (e.g. the findings, the results, etc).}

Pedagogical Implications

The study reveals a number of differences as well as similarities between Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology abstract writing. Both journals follow Dos Santos’ model, the theoretical framework of the study. At every stage of their writing life, the Algerian students struggled to write some texts in middle school, in high school, as undergraduates, as graduates , and as published scholars. Although writers master the English language but when it comes to writing academic genres things differ. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for writing courses for Algerian students, educators, or people who are interested in any kind of writing.

The Role of the Teacher and the ESP Practitioner

ESP teachers should be more aware of the nature of ESP teaching. ESP is mainly about the teaching of English which concerned with specific disciplines and needs. The lessons are determined by learners’ reason for leaning. To be a good ESP teacher and enhance learners’ skills, one must perform different roles as a teacher, a collaborator, a course designer and materials provider, a researcher, and an evaluator (Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1991: 298).

The Role of Institutions

Algerian universities should encourage publications and other research activities by devoting multidisciplinary⁶ and multilingual⁷ journals in which researchers of different backgrounds will be able to publish their works easily and frequently. In this way, they are going to be familiar with the activity of publication and journals will attract a great number of readers and clients.

In addition, universities must organize workshops, conferences, etc. Workshops are mostly designed to acquire knowledge and skills. Workshops can provide the opportunity of sharing knowledge and the contact with expert teachers. Teachers often need the help of experts to familiarize with such topics such as portfolio⁸ assessment, classroom research, teaching genres, etc.).

Furthermore, a continuous organization of national and international conferences on interesting topics will give the researchers the opportunity to free their thinking and be familiar with the practice of an abstract writing.

Conclusion

Nowadays, English imposes itself as the language of science. To access to world knowledge, one should master that language. Researchers have little chance outside English. Such a global intellectual communication is mainly done through journals articles. The key of having a paper published in any prestigious publication is to be able to write in the manner that is expected by the readership and publishers. International journals require accurate and scientific genres. This point was justified by the analysis’ results of Applied Linguistics and Language Learning & Technology abstracts. Thus, Algerian scholars and students need to develop skills that will enable them to acquire a more comprehensive mastery of new genres so that they will better participate in the global scientific communication.

In brief, this study tried to increase learners’ understanding of academic writing and broaden students’ perspective of textual variation with research articles abstracts writing. The study highlighted the fact that writing is a complex construct, consisting of a range of knowledge sets and processes. In addition, rhetorical organizations were not static but dynamic, impacted by many factors such as disciplinary conventions. Therefore, learners should be trained and encouraged to be observers, analytical, and sensitive when faced with research articles abstracts in their disciplines. Moreover, the results show the utility of computer programs in facilitating discourse analysis and helping practitioners in vocabulary teaching and improving the students’ academic writing. As a conclusion, the use of Concordances in genre analysis is absolutely great change.

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