Norms and power in learner genres and workplace genres

A common view of a genre (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993, 2004) is that it is a class of texts or communicative events with shared purposes, forms, and sociocultural conditions. Hence, if we are to teach genre usefully we have to teach not only the forms, but also their relation to purposes and sociocultural conditions. Furthermore, a genre is an indeterminate class and may consist of subgenres and local, company, or disciplinary variants. As time passes genres and subgenres change and develop. So ideally our teaching gives our students not so much skills with the formal and structural norms of a particular set of genres but a generic competence that allows them to adapt their writing to the situation and its generic requirements. In practice constraints of time and student attention may make this difficult, but institutions of higher education do typically offer various types of practically oriented writing training. Inside the education system there are sets of genres used to enable students to learn content and skills: lab reports, essays, presentations, etc. (Swales 1990), which we can call learner genres. The important audience for such texts is a teacher or examiner who has the right to assess them, and the writer’s aim is often largely to achieve this audience’s approval by meeting norms for form and content set by the audience itself. The writer’s aim to conform is admittedly usually accompanied by a sense of integrity and