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

91.1.2 The choice of the disciplinesA closer look at the context of each discipline is likely to provide valuableinformation about how book reviews are constructed and construed and how the contextof each discipline is mirrored in the genre. Awareness of how book reviews function inthe context of specific disciplines can contribute to learners’ better understanding andadherence to generic conventions, but more importantly, this understanding empowerslearners to respond appropriately to given situations (Devitt 1993:577).The choice of linguistics, chemistry and economics as representative fields ofacademia results from a few practical as well as epistemological reasons. The practicalreason is that these were the three fields in which editors in established journalsconfirmed their willingness to be interviewed about what they understood to be thepractices in book reviewing in their disciplines. The inclusion of interviews with bookreview editors in the study stems from the need for a contextualized study of genres. InGenre Analysis studies, there is a general belief that the decontextualized analysis of textfeatures, i.e., in isolation from the context in which text serves as interaction betweenmembers of a community, will always miss the significance of human communication(Johns, 1993). Thus, the underlying assumption in the present study is that, whenanalyzing text, one ‘should look further into the community of readers and its values’(ibid.:7). Interviews with experienced readers of book reviews are expected to providevaluable insights about the disciplinary communities that use the genre of book reviewsas an instance of communication. As experienced readers, book review editors are used