Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gunther Kress
Department of English, Media and Drama, Institute of Education,
University of London
Peter Knapp
Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, University of
Technology, Sydney
detached from the event. All of this leads to a relative stability in the
kind of text that is produced. We can recognise immediately that we are
reading a front-page report from paper X, even if we see only a small part
of it - provided of course that we know paper X.
The Focus piece by contrast has no such stability. For one thing it
has no existing readership; it has to create it. Given the heterogeneity of
any electorate, that is a difficult task. Despite the overt appearance of a
wish merely to report and inform, Shirley Templeforth wants to
persuade: hence the two little slogans: Fairer . . . cheaper. . .; to
cajole: what can be done.. .?; to bring readers on side: we need
t o . . ., DO we really need t o . . .? In other words, the relation with the
audience is quite unstable; it is all over the place. This makes for the
oddness of the text overall. But this also makes, by contrast, the point
about generically strong texts: because they are written in a situation of
a stable social relation of writers and readers, they can have the
appearance of being all of a piece. The stability, the repeatability of
that social situation leads to texts with a similar stability, a marked
conventionality, which makes the text seem simply natural and makes
its constructedness unnoticeable.
This is the crux of the argument about the teaching of conventions of
textual structures, the teaching of genres. In any society there are
regularly recurring situations in which a number of people interact to
perform or carry out certain tasks. Where these are accompanied by
language, of whatever kind, the regularity of the situation will give rise
to regularities in the texts which are produced in that situation -
whether as here, as a political pamphlet masquerading mildly as a little
newspaper; or whether in a science classroom, the writing up for the
teacher of the report of an experiment; or whether in a primary
classroom in the writing down of some recollection; or whether in any of
the myriad generic forms which make up the inventory of a literate
society. In our approach we would like to focus on making available at
least the following knowledge about genres:
++ an understanding by teachers and students that texts are produced in
order to do some specific social thing;
3c an understanding by teachers and by children that nearly all our
speaking or writing is guided to a greater or a lesser extent by
conventions of generic form;
++ an understanding by teachers and students that generic form is
always the product of particular social relations between the people
involved in the production of a text;
3c an understanding that while generic conventions provide certain
dimensions of constraint, generic form is never totally fixed, but is
rather always in the process of change (a job interview in 1991 is very
different from a job interview in 1931);
++ an understanding of the ways in which degrees and kinds of power
and power-difference enter into the production and maintenance of
generic form;
3c an understanding, in the context of what we have said above, of the
possibilities for change, innovation and creativity;
* an understanding by all teachers of the role which the functions,
forms and structures (the grammar) of language play in the
production of texts and their meanings;
Genre in a social theory of language 11
Literacy
The fabric of western technologically advanced societies rests on the
technology of literacy. This may seem a perverse and paradoxical
statement to make in an age which is all bedazzled by the wonders and
speed of electronic technologies. However, the whole edifice of that
technology rests on the achievements of literacy, and is secured by its
continued dominance.
Literacy practices vary, of course, both through history and between
classes and other cultural groups. We need to be specific therefore when
we speak of literacy, to be aware that we are indulging in a sweeping
generalisation. But consider literacy in the form in which we meet it in
the paragraph from the scientific journal, for instance, and contrast that
with an oral tradition as it might be represented by the brief spoken text
above. Consider the enormously complex syntax of noun-forms such as
a comprehensive model of sexual selection, or ecological data
obtained in the field. How would we translate either of these into
informal speech, the kind of speech which our neighbour wouldnt judge
as stuck up or affected?
This little, perhaps trivial, exercise gives an indication of the gulf that
separates the cultural and cognitive worlds of speech and writing. You
would, literally, have to turn these noun complexes on their head, go
right back to some quite different beginning: Well, you know, Im
interested in how dungflies select each other when they want to mate,
and when Ive found that out Id like to make a model, a little theory, you
know what I mean, which includes all the various ways in which they do
t h a t . . .
The grammar of speech belongs to a world and a culture in which ideas
are developed bit by bit, one thing is added to another, bits are repeated,
building over time a picture of the complex whole. The grammar of
writing belongs to a world and a culture in which things are stacked
inside other things, on top of things, or dangling off the side of a bit of
the structure, building all at once a complex, encapsulated, integrated
structure. The former has advantages: it attends to the understanding of
the hearer, developing arguments a t the hearers pace and leisure. The
latter has advantages, developing complex constructs which redefine the
world, compacting and abbreviating it. It is the language which likes the
control of hierarchy and space; the former is the language which likes
control of time and sequence.
These are, we believe, foundational facts about the cultures which
make up our kind of society. It is knowledge which must form part of
every childs education for the multi-cultural, information-based society
of the next decades. If English is to retain its culturally and politically
Genre in a social theory of language 15
salient place in the curriculum these are some central questions - there
are others - in any thinking about the future of the subject.
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