ABSTRACT
Genre analysis, over the years, has acquired considerable pedagogical importance at all levels of language teaching and training, primarily because of its focus on textualisation and more recently, as critical genre theory of contextualization of interdiscursive aspects of specialist discourses, which makes it an invaluable tool in accounting for some of the creativity seen in large-scale mixing, embedding and bending of genres (Bhatia, 1995, 2004, 2010). This creative process Fairclough (1993: 141) refers to as “professional and public service orders of discourse’ generating new hybrid forms”; and which Luke (1994: viii) specifi es as the “shifting and blurring of cultural forms’ ranging from infotainment to docudramas”. The shifting, mixing and bending of genres in professional practice, and more generally in public discourses, is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as he points out.
