ABSTRACT
Children's development of school-based genre knowledge is the development of spatially and temporally organized scripts or schemata. This chapter explains the class of genres known as curriculum, pedagogical, or classroom genres. It concerns the place of genre instruction in the context of classroom instruction. The chapter focuses on the issues of what factors prevent the explicit teaching of genre conventions, and whether or not the pedagogical genres should be explicitly taught within the curricula in which they occur: science lesson, literature lesson, history lesson. It discusses a genre-based, sociocognitive perspective on language instruction developed by the functional or systemic linguists. This perspective has, we believe, much in common with the recent work in educational psychology on Vygotskian approaches to classroom instruction. Together, these two strands of inquiry have implications for a serious rethinking of written language instruction at all levels.
