Genre Analysis

In recent years the concept of 'register' has been increasingly replaced by emphasis on the analysis of genre, which relates work in sociolinguistics, text linguistics and discourse analysis to the study of specialist areas of language. Teachers, course designers and materials writers concerned with teaching language for specific purposes as well as applied linguistics researchers, will find John Swales a clear, authoritative guide to this complex area. He provides a survey of approaches to varieties of language, and considers these in relation to communication and task-based language learning. He goes on to outline an approach to the analysis of genre, and then proceeds to consider examples of different genres and how they can be made accessible through genre analysis. This will be important reading for all those working in teaching English for academic purposes. The concept of genre is also highly relevant to issues in writing across the curriculum and it will therefore be of key interest to those working in post-secondary writing and composition as well as those directly concerned with EAP.