2.7 Genre

As indicated earlier, genre is the textual realization of culture. It is a term used in SFL to refer to particular text types that "represent the system of staged, goal oriented social processes through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives" (Martin, 1997, p. 13). Genres are social in the sense that they are created by people in their social interactions with one another; they are goal oriented in that they exist to serve specific purposes; and they are staged because it usually takes more than one step for people to achieve their goals. Genres are also flexible and subject to manipulation in that they tend to respond to changes in people's ways of life and cultural worldviews, as well as to the immediate situational context and participants' intentions. At the same time, however, genres are predictable and recognizable because they are "recurrent configurations of meaning" in a culture (Martin, 2009, p. 19). Thus, while the exact shape, or textual realization, of a genre can vary from one instance to another and change across contexts and over time, each genre has a constellation of specifiable discursive conventions that derive from and encode the functions, purposes, and meanings of a particular social occasion (Kress, 1989). These conventions are what render a genre recognizable and distinctive from other genres.

Three broad categories of academic genres have been identified (Schleppegrell, 2004). They are personal, factual, and analytical. Each of these macrogenres contains subgenres. For example, personal genres include recount and narrative; they recreate personal experiences. Factual genres include report, description, and procedure; they present factual information about the natural and social worlds. Analytical genres include account, explanation, and exposition; they analyze, interpret, and argue. When elements from two or more genres are mixed within the same composition, the resulting text belongs to a category called "hybrid genre", as can be seen in J. K. Rowling's hugely popular Harry Potter series (1997-2007), which blends elements from at least four children's literature genres (e.g., high fantasy, low fantasy, school story, mystery story) (Eggins, 2004), and in Text 2-5 (Fang, 2014a, p. 122), which juxtaposes exposition (taking a position I like alligators and then trying to justify it They are cool), recount (relating a story about the child writer's encounter with a specific crocodile), and report (describing alligators' attributes and habitual activities).

Text 2-5

I like alligators. They are cool. Some people are afraid of alligators. I am not, even when they have 80 teeth. I have been two feet away from a crocodile nine feet long. My friend was trying to run after it, but he stopped. The crocodile could have bit me, but he was afraid to look, so he swam off. Alligators like to rest after food. Most alligators hid until another alligator sees something and then attack that alligator, then eat the meat. Alligators are reptiles.