Table Of ContentGenre and Institutions
Open Linguistics Series
Series Editor
Robin F. Fawcctt, Cardiff University
The Open Linguistics Series, to which this book makes a significant contribution, is
'open' in two senses. First, it provides an open forum for works associated with any
school of linguistics or with none. Linguistics has now emerged from a period in which
many (but never all) of the most lively minds in the subject seemed to assume that
transformational-generative grammar - or at least something fairly closely derived
from it — would provide the main theoretical framework for linguistics for the foresee-
able future. In Kuhn's terms, linguistics had appeared to some to have reached the
'paradigm' stage. Reality today is very different. More and more scholars are working
to improve and expand theories that were formerly scorned for not accepting as
central the particular set of concerns highlighted in the Chomskyan approach - such
as Halliday's systemic theory (as exemplified in this book), Lamb's stratiflcational
model and Pike's tagmemics — while others are developing new theories. The series is
open to all approaches, then — including work in the generativist-formalist tradition.
The second sense in which the series is 'open' is that it encourages works that open
out 'core' linguistics in various ways: to encompass discourse and the description of
natural texts; to explore the relationship between linguistics and its neighbouring dis-
ciplines such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cultural
and literary studies; and to apply it in fields such as education and language pathology.
Relations between the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are covered in a
sister series, Communication in Artificial Intelligence. Studies that are primarily
descriptive are published in a new series, Functional Descriptions of Language.
Recent titles in the series
Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition,
M. A. K. Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthicsscn
Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures,
Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed.)
Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate, Geoffrey Sampson
Empirical Linguistics, Geoffrey Sampson
The Intonation Systems o/ English, Paul Tench
Language Policy in Britain and France: The Processes of Policy, Dennis Ager
Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic
Eviden.ee, Michael Fortescue
Learning Through Language in Early Childhood, Clare Painter
Pedagogy and the Shaping oj Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes,
Frances Christie (ed.)
Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.)
Researching Language in Schools and Communities: Functional Linguistic Perspectives,
Len Unsworlh (ed.)
Summary Justice: judges Address juries, Paul Robertshaw
Thematic Development in English Texts, Mohsen Ghadessy (cd.)
Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. Selected Papers oj Ruqaiya Hasan, Carmel Cloran,
David Butt and Geoffrey Williams (eds)
Wards, Meaning and Vocaindary: An Introduction to Modern English lexicology,
Howard Jackson and Etienne Li Amvela
Genre and Institutions
Social Processes in the Workplace and School
Edited by
Frances Christie and J. R. Martin
CONTINUUM
London and New York
Continuum
Wellington House, 125 Strand, London WC2R OBB
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503
First published by Cassell in 1997. Reprinted in paperback in 2000.
© Frances Christie, J. R. Martin and the contributors 1997
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
ISBN 0-304-33766-8 (hardback)
0-8264-4740-6 (paperback)
(CIP) available at the British Library
Typeset by Textype Typesetters, Cambridge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, www.biddks.co.uk
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction
Frances Christie and ]. R. Martin i
i Analysing genre: functional parameters
/. R. Martin 3
a Science, technology and technical literacies
David Rose 40
3 The language of administration: organizing human activity in formal
institutions
Rick ledema 73
4 Death, disruption and the moral order: the narrative impulse in mass-media
'hard news' reporting
Peter White i o i
5 Curriculum macrogenres as forms of initiation into a culture
Frances Christie 134
6 Learning how to mean - scientifically speaking: apprenticeship into
scientific discourse in the secondary school
Robert Veel 161
7 Constructing and giving value to the past: an investigation into secondary
school history
Caroline Coffin 196
8 Entertaining and instructing: exploring experience through story
Joan Rothery and Maree Slenglin a 31
Index 265
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Contributors
Frances Christie is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of Melbourne.
Caroline Coffin is a Lecturer in Language and Literacy at the Open
University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Rick ledema is engaged in a project on the discourses of policy planning
with the School of Health Services Management at the University of New
South Wales, Sydney.
J. R. Martin is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Sydney.
David Rose's interest in literacy, and its role in shaping the consciousness
of peoples and the structures of their societies, arose initially from a long
involvement with Australian Aboriginal communities.
Joan Rothery is a literacy consultant.
Maree Stenglin is Manager of Education Services at the Australian
Museum.
Robert Veel is a Sydney-based independent researcher and consultant in
language education.
Peter White is a linguist based at the University of Sydney.
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Introduction
This volume emerges from about fifteen years' research into genre in
Australia, undertaken by systemic functional (SF) linguists associated with
the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Michael Halli-
day had opened the Department of Linguistics in 1976, and two of the
contributors here - Frances Christie and Joan Rothery - were among the
first group of students in the new MA programme he instituted. Shortly
after the opening of the department, in 1977, Jim Martin arrived to finish
his doctoral thesis under Halliday's supervision, before taking up a tutor-
ing position in 1978. As the years passed, Martin and Rothery com-
menced their study of writing in the primary school, leading to their first
early descriptions of written genres in the early 1g8os. Both Rothery and
Christie commenced doctoral studies with Martin, and they were among
the first of his doctoral students working on both a development of genre
theory and an associated development of register theory. While Martin
and Rothery continued their study of written genres, Christie, who had
moved away from Sydney, worked on the genres of classroom talk, and
associated descriptions of the ways written genres relate to patterns of
classroom talk. Just as Martin and Rothery were to turn their attention
increasingly to the genres of older writers, so too Christie in time turned
her attention to the classroom talk of the upper primary school and, later,
to that of the secondary school.
In more recent years, a younger generation of educational linguists and
linguists (as well as Rothery) worked with Martin in the 'Write It Right'
Project (1991-94), funded by the New South Wales Disadvantaged
Schools Program and the New South Wales Education and Training Foun-
dation. The latter project attempted to examine the written genres of a
range of significant key learning areas of secondary education (English,
history, science, mathematics and geography), and to consider their
relationship to the written genres of selected work situations (the media,
science industry and administration). Many, but not all the participants in
this project have contributed chapters in this book. Christie, at least, is not
of that group, having continued to work in professional contexts well away
from Sydney, and in the pursuit of what, following many of the ideas of
Bernstein, she would call the pedagogic discourse of schooling.
