universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

8genres as commonsensical truth, not as dynamic forms of discourse that serve social andcultural purposes.A preferable view of Genre Analysis is that of an area of investigation aboutdiscourse that aims to make evident the ways that individuals, by way of usingconventionality and stability, can offer their particular worldviews. Therefore, this studyattempts to foster the awareness of the communicative function of texts in its context ofproduction, i.e., the discipline in which book reviews are being used to communicate.Model following alone without appropriate and holistic understanding of the rhetoricalcontext pertaining the genre cannot guarantee EFL writers’ success:Although genre may help stabilize the multiform rhetorical situation of scientificwriting and may simplify the many rhetorical choices to be made, the writerloses control of the writing when he or she does not understand the genre.(Bazerman, 1988:8)Likewise, in the tradition of philosophers of language such as Wittgenstein andAustin, rhetoric, as the ultimate basis of the meaning of linguistic expression (Garver,1973:xxi), studies the role linguistic expression plays in human activity. Hence tounderstand linguistic expression, one must understand the activity in which the use oflanguage is embedded, the rules involving when and how to use language, and finallyone must know how to follow the rules, which in turn depends on practice, on beinginitiated into that activity (Garver, 1973:xxi).