ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to attend to Swales' early advocacy for studying genre environments by exploring what can be learned through context investigations and how to do them. It considers ways that genre context study illuminates several things, including reasons for genres' textual conventions, individuals' experiences using genres, relationships among genres in the same context, and ways that genres impact their settings. The chapter reviews the ethnographic and 'textographic' approaches to studying genre contexts, and gives opportunities to practice using techniques of these approaches in own genre context studies. A potential concern about linguistically oriented genre analyses is that their structural descriptions may be treated by ESP students, or even their teachers, as formulas to be strictly followed without sensitivity to the purposes, rationales, or potential variability of these formal patterns. Human genre users constitute part of any genre's contexts, and 'hearing' about their genre use practices can be useful for those, such as ESP students, learning similar genres.
