Language features as the pathways to genre: Students’ attention to non-prototypical features and its implications

The ESP School of genre study has been noted as increasingly bridging the linguistic and the rhetorical traditions in genre studies. However, some genre theorists have characterized the ESP genre approaches as treating rhetorical contexts as mainly, if not merely, the background for explicating texts. This paper explores this issue through examining how some students made sense of the relationship between context and text in two L2 writing courses that adopted the ESP genre-based framework of learning academic writing. Four examples are presented to show that the students seemed to approach such a relationship in complex, individuated ways that seemingly resist the above portrayal of ESP-oriented genre analysis. Although a sense of rhetorical context seemed to provide some background for the students to single out certain textual features as noteworthy, text was hardly the end goal of these students’ analyses. Instead, the students’ highlighted language features seemed to function more as the pathways to their enhanced and extended understanding of such complex contextual dimensions of genre as authorial intentions, intertextuality, presupposition and rhetoricity, and disciplinarity in academic writing. These findings help raise several questions for future L2 writing research and practice.

Research highlights
► Four L2 graduate students analyzed sample research articles (RA) in their fields.
► They identified language features not normally recognized as specific to the RA genre.
► These features are the pathways to understanding the contextual dimensions of genre.
► These dimensions include intertextuality, rhetoricity, and disciplinarity in RA.
► The examples show inadequacy in experts’ portrayal of ESP text-context relationship.