Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing | Jay Jordan

New Rhetoric

"Genre in Three Traditions: Implications for ESL" by Sunny Hyon (1996)

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Sunny Hyon (1996) intended here to examine the implications of genre theory for L2 writing pedagogy. She focused on three main scholarly and pedagogical traditions: English for Specific Purposes (ESP), New Rhetoric (NR), and Australian approaches based on Systemic–Functional (SF) Linguistics. All three approaches, she related, share a goal of helping students become "more successful readers and writers of academic and workplace texts" (p. 700). However, different ideological investments mean "success" is inflected differently. In Australian genre pedagogies, which are common in grade schools enrolling large numbers of "nonmainstream" students (p. 701), discursive targets are presented as tools for social justice that carry the promise of access to economic and other forms of capital. ESP and NR carry much less explicitly political impetus, in Hyon's view, because the students with whom their practitioners work are more likely to be already enrolled in universities as "mainstream" undergraduates or graduates (p. 702). In general, on a scale from more to less explicit formal focus on specific genres, NR is the least explicit of the three approaches under review: citing scholars including Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin (1993), Patrick Dias (1994), Aviva Freedman (1994), and Carolyn R. Miller (1984), Hyon observed that NR privileges genre knowledge as an effect of community acculturation. In this view, instruction is typically implicit—through the consistent introduction of generic exemplars that circulate in a given academic or professional community. Indeed, explicit instruction may be suspect because it runs the risk of glossing over generic features (and the rationales for them) that students should instead discover themselves.

Hyon ultimately concluded that, while NR approaches can provide "rich perspectives on what actions genres perform in various communities," their skepticism about explicit teaching is "unwarranted for ESL instruction" (p. 713). In addition, she argued NR-based pedagogies may not lend themselves to replication owing to a tendency to report case by case: that is, richness of contextual focus and description for Hyon trades off with the utility of NR approaches across a variety of L2 teaching contexts.