ABSTRACT
A major focus of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) genre analysis has been on moves, those textual segments that make up a genre's organizational structure and help the genre achieve its purposes. In offering an overview of ESP moves analysis, this chapter begins by considering what moves are and then describes processes for examining them. These processes include text-focused moves identification, consultation with expert informants, and comparison of genre moves across different cultural contexts. For those new to genre analysis, moves as a concept can be a bit challenging to grasp, at least at first. A dance analogy borrowed from Florelei Luib helps newcomers ease into understanding what moves are. Genres, like dances, allow for variation across individual performances of their moves. Moves can also be understood in terms of their relationship to a genre's overarching communicative purposes. Few published ESP genre studies describe the processes that the authors used to identify genre moves.
