Genre and Institutions

The contributors to this volume present 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 meanings 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 practices, how educational settings provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs, and how theorizing about such matters helps to build a theory of social action. In this way, it demonstrates the power of systemic functional analysis in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality. The discussion is built around the extensive analysis of texts collected in a number of work and school settings. While most of the instances are written genres, some are spoken - most notably in the chapter devoted to the discussion of the spoken classroom texts in which the teaching and learning of the written genres take place.