ABSTRACT
Genre studies incorporate a variety of frameworks used to analyse a range of textual genres, constructed, interpreted and used by members of various disciplinary communities in academic, professional, workplace and other institutionalised contexts. The analyses range from a close linguistic study of texts as discursive products, and spanning across to investigations into dynamic complexities of communicative practices of professional and workplace communities, to a broader understanding of socio-cultural and critical aspects often employed in the process of interpreting these textual genres in real-life settings (Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993; Bazerman, 1994). Some studies go further in an attempt to understand the nature of discursive practices of various disciplinary cultures, which often give shape to these communicative processes and textual genres (Bhatia, 2008a). Others tend to develop awareness and understanding of genre knowledge, which can be seen to be a crucial factor in genre-based analyses as situated cognition related to the discursive practices of members of disciplinary cultures (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995). In many of these analyses the cooperation and collaboration of specialists provide an important corrective to purely text-based approaches (Smart, 1998). In order to appreciate this increasingly complex and dynamic development in genre studies, one needs to have a good understanding of some of the key aspects of the analysis of language use that lead to some of these interesting and insightful developments in genre theory.
