Genre Identification Based on SFL Principles: The Representation of Text Types and Genres in English Language Teaching Material

Abstract

Genre awareness has recently gained a lot of attention due to the recognition of the vital impact of genres in discourse comprehension and production. At the same time, the rapid development of corpus linguistics studies has caused a reconsideration of methodological issues such as the classification of texts during corpus building. This study aims to untangle commonly confusing terms such as ‘text type’, ‘genre’ and ‘register’, reviewing their use by prominent researchers. It then attempts to investigate the range of genres involved in writing tasks presented in English language teaching material. Reporting on experience from the Writing Model Answers corpus classification of texts, we explain how we identified genres based on Systemic Functional Linguistics principles. We also suggest a more student-friendly ‘naming’, which signals the basic requirements of the task. By measuring the representation of the initial text types compared to the redefined tasks, seen as genres, we show the range of genres involved in each text type category in this context. Classification of texts based on genres and appropriate ‘naming’ of these genres is shown to offer more insight on the variation among texts. We propose that its implementation in teaching material could assist second language learners in developing linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, a combination of competences that is required in language testing.