ABSTRACT

The term ‘genre’ can be traced as far back as Aristotle; it means ‘kind’ or ‘form’ and was used by the Greek philosopher in his Poetics to refer to major types of literature: poetry, drama and the epic. These divisions have expanded considerably, but the notion of genre as a particular type of literature has lasted into the present era. At the same time, it has been extended to refer to more popular cultural forms: soap opera, film noir, western, thriller. These are terms which have entered into the popular consciousness and which are studied in the fields of cultural and media studies. In the field of Applied Linguistics and Educational Linguistics, however, the term ‘genre’ is used rather differently and refers to different communicative events which are associated with particular settings and which have recognised structures and communicative functions. Examples of genres according to this conceptualisation would be business reports, academic lectures, news articles, recipes, religious sermons, political speeches, curriculum vitae, and more recent ‘virtual’ genres such as various types of e-mails, text messages, instant messages, tweets and Facebook pages.