Reflections on Genre and Culture

Dr. Marianne Turner Monash University

I read a Japanese story a few years ago that made me feel very upset. It was about a mother who was carrying a baby on her back. She needed to walk a long way home and she was told (by some kind of spirit) that she was not, under any circumstances, to look back at her baby until she was home. If she looked back, the baby would die.

The mother walked and walked until she got home, not once looking back. When she got home she looked at her baby and the baby was dead. I was reading the story in Japanese and thought maybe that I had misunderstood. But the illustrations were quite clear. The baby was dead. お仕舞い. The end.

This story stayed with me, most likely because I had a very strong reaction to it. I was also deeply uncomfortable with the lack of resolution.

For me, the narrative genre has an arc: there is an orientation to the story, there is some kind of problem, and then there is a resolution to the problem. There also might be a coda at the end.

I have said this to Japanese friends and they have nodded and laughed at my need for a resolution, a ‘closed’ ending. An open ending that provokes emotion, that offers some kind of lesson, is totally acceptable.

The mirror effect

So the idea of what is ‘correct’ when it comes to genre can be quite ingrained even if we know intellectually that, in other traditions, it can mean more than substituting one language for another.

Genre, as used in language teaching (and education in general) is “a term for grouping texts together, representing broad rhetorical templates that writers draw on to respond to recurring situations: what users see as effective ways of getting things done using language” (Hyland, 2024, p.1227.)

When we only think of genre as relating to the teaching of English, as we usually do in Australian schools, the cultural nature of genre can easily be overlooked.

I would probably have continued to overlook it myself. But while I was reading the Japanese story about the mother and her baby, I was witness to the explicit teaching of genre in a Japanese-English primary bilingual program in Australia.

In the English classroom the children were learning about orientation, problem, resolution in their story-writing and the same approach was taken in the Japanese classroom to structure the students’ story-writing in Japanese. The students learned the term 解決 (resolution).

They were also learning to say 一番目, 二番目, 三番目 (first, second and third) in order to support an argument, similar to what they were learning in English. When I asked the Japanese teachers whether children would learn to argue in that way in Japan, they told me that persuasive texts were not really taught in Japan. It was just…. different.

Conforming to the Australian system of teaching and learning was logical considering that the school needed to follow the Australian Curriculum. However, it did give the impression that story-telling and persuasion in Japanese happened in the same way as in English, at least the way English is taught in Australian schools.

This shifting of genre can also happen in textbooks. For example, Mahboob (2014) found that students in Pakistan were learning how to write biographies in English by beginning with a reference to Islam (rather than the person in question) and foregrounding religion throughout. This illustrates how approaches to English writing can be culturally-bound, not only approaches to other languages.

The utility and elasticity of genre

Genre is a useful tool to help students understand texts and also to guide their writing. A focus on where the students are coming from - how they’ve used language before (both English and other languages) - is a rich point of departure for any discussion.

Analysis of authentic texts, or texts out there in the wild, helps to explore genre in this way. It also raises interesting questions:

What thinking lies behind our taken-for-granted assumptions of genre?
What tensions can genre-related language analysis uncover? For example, why do so many newspaper ‘reports’ have persuasive language in them?

Moving away from a very bounded understanding of genre as it applies to specific templates in English helps to build everyone’s language awareness, not least the teacher’s. I always come away from discussion with students learning something new.

References

Hyland, K. (2024). Genre‐Based Instruction and Corpora. TESOL Quarterly, 58(3), 1227–1234. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3273

Mahboob, A. (2014). Language variation and education: A focus on Pakistan, in S. Buschfeld, T. Hoffmann, M. Huber, & A. Kautzsch (Eds.). Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond, Vol. v. G49 (pp. 267-281). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g49.15mah