Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 772 de 957
Microgenres: Critical “markers” that can facilitate teaching and assessing writing
within and across schools and colleges of engineering
Rick Evans
rae27@cornell.edu
Cornell University, Ithaca
United States of America
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of microgenres and locates them
within the well-established and now international field of genre studies. It
describes a methodology for identifying microgenres and presents the promising
early results of a preliminary study of one such microgenre, compositional
report, extant in a corpus of student texts produced for a writing-intensive
engineering course. These results indicate that microgenres can be identified in
a way that is valid and reliable. They reveal that there is the possibility of
variation or that there are ways of organizing this microgenre in order to
realize purpose. These results also suggest that we might be able to construct a
typology or typologies related to particular disciplines within engineering
and/or the field of engineering, and thereby facilitate student learning,
participation, and accessment.
Introduction
Over the last three decades, researchers from a range of different disciplines have begun
to articulate an “understanding of genre that connects kinds of texts to kinds of social
actions” (Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010). In other words, they have begun to explore specific
genres as ways of getting things done or ways of doing something in particular. Whether
we locate the origins of this understanding with Carolyn Miller (1994) and genre as
“typified rhetorical and social action,” or with J.R. Martin (1985) and genre as “a staged,
goal-oriented social process” or with John Swales (1990) and genre as “a conventionalized
communicative event closely associated with communities of practice,” all represent
important initial efforts in what has become known as the “generic perspective” (Bhatia,
2004). Indeed, that generic perspective today is emerging from five distinct although not
dissimilar areas: Literary Theory, Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) or the Sydney
School, English for Special/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP), North American Genre Studies
and Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) and the French and Swiss Genre Traditions and
Brazillian Genre Synthesis (SDI) (Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010).
While each of these areas offers something special to our understanding of genre, they
agree at least in general with Amy Devitt (2004), who defines genre as “typified action” in
response to a “recurring situation,” an action that “commonly reveals its social functions
with characteristic discourse features.” In addition, they agree that a certain genre “usually
operates [within] a set of genres” reflective of “the values [and] epistemology” of
particular “communities, collectives [or] social networks” (Devitt, 2004). And finally, they
encourage that we adopt “genre awareness” as a teaching/learning outcome and believe
that that outcome is best realized through “pedagogical strategies that keep generic form
and generic contexts [and thereby actions] united” (Devitt, 2004).
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011