Genre and Institutions

Social Processes in the Workplace and School

Frances Christie, J. R. Martin

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780826478696
• eBook ISBN: 9781847141378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science

This book examines genres as instances of social processes, enacting a range of important institutional practices, hence also shaping people's subjectivities. Genres represent purposive and staged ways of building means in a culture. The book's particular claim to originality is that, using systemic functional grammar, it demonstrates how given genres build or enact social practice, how educational setting provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs, and how theorizing about such matters helps build a theory of social action, revealing how powerful is the systemic functional analysis in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality. The discussion is built around extensive analysis of instances of texts collected in a number of worksites and school settings. While most are instances of written genres, some are spoken, most notably the chapter that is devoted to the discussion of the spoken classroom texts in which the teaching and learning of the written genres take place.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Analysing genre: functional parameters
• 2 Science, technology and technical literacies
• 3 The language of administration: organizing human activity in formal institutions
• 4 Death, disruption and the moral order: the narrative impulse in mass-media 'hard news' reporting
• 5 Curriculum macrogenres as forms of initiation into a culture
• 6 Learning how to mean - scientifically speaking: apprenticeship into scientific discourse in the secondary school
• 7 Constructing and giving value to the past: an investigation into secondary school history
• 8 Entertaining and instructing: exploring experience through story
• Index