ABSTRACT
The increased prominence of genre-based approaches to the teaching of academic or professional writing has been a feature of English for Specific Purposes courses in the last ten years. The influential research of Swales (1981; 1990) on the introduction to the academic article and that of Bhatia (1993) on promotional genres have been translated into teaching materials (for example, Swales & Feak, 1994; Weissberg & Buker, 1990), that provide valuable insights for students into the ways of structuring research reports and articles. There are no doubt numerous other sets of in-house materials that also make use of this research. The academic article, in particular, has a regularity in its discourse structure that lends itself to an analysis that makes use of “moves” that typically occur in a more or less fixed order. Although there have been concerns about the dangers of an overprescriptive approach to the academic writing resulting from a genre approach (Paltridge, 1996; Prior, 1995) and about the absence of research into other faculty genres such as the master’s or doctoral dissertation (Dudley-Evans, 1997). there is little doubt that the existing research into genre has enriched and broadened the teaching of academic writing. Similarly, the awareness that much nonliterary writing involves the mixing of genres, and the need to manipulate the generic conventions (Bhatia, 1997a), has led to increased sophistication in the teaching of professional writing.
