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Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

Genre and language learning: A social semiotic perspective

Abstract
This paper provides a basic introduction to the genre-based literacy research undertaken over the past three decades by educators
and functional linguists in Australia and their innovative contributions to literacy pedagogy and curriculum. It focuses on the concept
of genre, its place within the model of language and context developed as systemic functional linguistics, and the implementation
of this concept in learning to read and write. This approach to genre is illustrated with respect to the synthesis of a story genre built
in steps through key choices for lexis, grammar, and discourse structure.
© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Genre; Systemic functional linguistics; Pedagogy; Curriculum

1. Getting going with genre

For the past three decades teachers and functional linguists in Australia have been co-operatively engaged in action
research projects designed to enhance literacy teaching and learning across all sectors of schooling. In these projects
the notion of genre, defined as a staged goal-oriented social process, has played a central role. Hyon (1996) provides
a canonical discussion of the role of genre in these initiatives in relation to the ESP and New Rhetoric traditions (see
also Hyland, 2002, 2007). Australian programs are reviewed in Christie (1992), Feez (2002), Macken-Horarik (2002),
Martin (1993, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2001), and Martin and Rose (2005). Cope and Kalantzis (1993) and Feez (1998)
provide useful introductions; Schleppegrell (2004) develops the central themes for a North American readership.
Australian initiatives are often referred to as the ‘Sydney School’ (e.g., Johns, 2002), a term introduced by Green
and Lee (1994); this acknowledges the seminal role played by Hallidayan staff and students in the Department of
Linguistics at the University of Sydney and their collaborators in the Sydney metropolis, although it has to be clarified
that by the late 1980s the work had spread far beyond this region.
In the 1980s this research focused on writing in primary school, dealing principally with indigenous and migrant
Australian students who were learning English as a second language outside the home. At the time, Australia had
embraced process writing and whole language as informing practices for its primary school literacy curriculum (inspired
by Graves, 1983). As implemented in Australia, this approach expected schools to set aside time for writing, on a
daily basis where possible, in accordance with the philosophy that people learn to write by writing. Students were
encouraged to produce successive drafts, some in response to ‘conferencing’ sessions with their teachers; the writing
process culminated in the ‘publication’ of a more formally ‘edited’ script.

E-mail address: [email protected].

0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.linged.2009.01.003
 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21 11

In Australia, this pedagogy had produced classrooms in which a very narrow range of writing was undertaken by
students who were regularly invited to write on a topic of their own choice in any form they chose and whose teachers
played a facilitating rather than a modelling role (Rothery, 1996). As one teacher commented to me, defending some
advice she had given students before writing, “I know I’m not supposed to tell them anything, but after all, I am
their teacher.” As a result, most students had to make use of text types they were familiar with from spoken language
outside the school—including short observations and comments on past experience, and recounts of unproblematic
sequences of events. This limited experience of writing did very little to prepare students for learning across the
curriculum in primary school, for writing in the specialized subject areas of secondary school, or for dealing with
various community genres they might encounter as the most fluent English speaker of their family. Consequently, as an
issue of social justice, interventions were developed to broaden the range of writing undertaken, including the design
of innovative pedagogy and curriculum to achieve this goal. These initiatives inspired important related work in adult
migrant English teaching, reviewed by Feez (2002) and modelled in Feez (1998). In this adult sector ‘needs-based’
programs were re-formulated in terms of genre, by way of establishing explicit goals that could be measured in relation
to outcomes-based curricula.
In the 1990s the focus of this work was extended to writing in secondary school and the workplace, as exemplified in
Christie and Martin (1997) and reviewed by Veel (2006). This effort involved mapping school disciplines and selected
workplaces as families of genres (as exemplified for history in Fig. 4 below), and included work by Coffin (2006)
on history, Macken-Horarik (2002) and Veel (1997) on science; it also looked at mapping the relationships between
school and workplace literacies, for example Korner et al. (2007) on science industry and Feez et al. (2008) on media
discourse. This disciplinary focus encouraged researchers to develop models of the role played by language and other
modalities of communication in constructing knowledge (Christie & Martin, 2007), and the role played by evaluative
language in giving value to this knowledge (Martin & White, 2005).
By the noughts, this writing research was complemented by a focus on reading, which is foregrounded in Rose’s
Learning to Read/Reading to Learn initiatives (Rose, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007; see also Martin, 2006; Martin & Rose,
2005, 2007b). Rose used the notion of genre, including stages and their phases to prepare students for reading, carefully
summarizing the material they were about to read in spoken language they could all understand. His work features
close attention to micro-interactions between teachers and students around texts, including the design of specialized
cycles of localized interaction for reading instruction.

2. Genre in a functional model of language

Underlying these three phases of action research was the evolving model of language in context known as systemic
functional linguistics (for recent introductions see Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin & Rose, 2007a, 2008).
This model involves a rich conception of language as a meaning-making system, involving phonology/graphology,
lexicogrammar, and discourse semantics—as outlined in Fig. 1.
The distinctive features of this model, which made it such an indispensable foundation for genre-based literacy
programs, are (i) its focus on grammar as a meaning- making resource and (ii) its focus on text as semantic choice in
social context. Halliday’s conception of grammar as a resource for meaning provided an essential tool for analyzing
the texts students were expected to read and write; this model was elaborated through the 1980s and 1990s by Martin
and his students as they developed discourse semantics resources for analyzing meaning beyond the clause. These
resources made it possible to be explicit about what had to be learned and taught across the curriculum in all sectors
of schooling, so that teaching and learning could be mobilized as transitive verbs—as social activities with concrete
goals as far as apprenticeship into literacy was concerned.
SFL models of language involve a trinocular conception of meaning as comprising ideational resources for natural-
izing reality, interpersonal resources for negotiating social relations, and textual resources for managing information
flow; these generalized orientations to meaning are referred to as metafunctions. In addition, Halliday’s trinocu-
lar perspective on meaning is projected onto social context, giving rise to the register variables of field, tenor,
and mode. This tripartite metafunctional perspective makes it possible to interpret meaning in relation to context
along three dimensions: (i) ideational meaning as a resource for building field knowledge, enabling participation
in domestic, recreational, academic, and professional activities; (ii) interpersonal meaning as a resource for valuing
these activities and enacting tenor (i.e., power and solidarity in relation to shared values); and (iii) textual mean-
ing as a resource for phasing ideational and interpersonal meaning together in textures sensitive to mode (i.e.,
12 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

Fig. 1. Levels of language (strata).

the communicative demands of spoken and written discourse, and alternative modalities of electronic communica-
tion).
The model was further elaborated by adding on a level of genre, whose job it was to coordinate resources, to specify
just how a given culture organizes this meaning potential into recurrent configurations of meaning, and phases meaning
through stages in each genre. The basic idea here is that we cannot achieve our social purposes all at once, but have to
move in steps, assembling meaning as we go, so that by the end of a text or spoken interaction we have ended up more
or less where we wanted to be. The high-level position of genre in the model provided a way of talking holistically
about the social purpose of texts and the ways in which different genres marshalled different resources to achieve their
goals.
This was an important step as far as re-introducing knowledge about language (KAL) into the curriculum was
concerned (Carter, 1996). In Australia KAL had been banished from both teacher training programs and school curricula
as ‘useless’ and ‘harmful’ by radical progressive educators, with the result that practicing teachers had no KAL to share
with their students. Genre theory provided teachers with KAL that was relatively easy to bring to consciousness and
did not immediately demand a costly induction into knowledge about functional grammar and discourse semantics.
The overall picture of language, metafunctions, and social context is summarized in Fig. 2.
For reasons of space I will not explore the relationship between genre and register in a model of this kind here (see
Martin, 1999c for discussion). Suffice it to say that one of the reasons for separating genre from field, tenor, and mode

Fig. 2. Metafunction in relation to language, register, and genre.

was to allow for shifts in field, tenor, and mode variables from one stage of a genre to another (e.g., being friendly
in the beginning of a service encounter and then toughening up to close the sale). We were also concerned to allow
for variations in subject matter (field), formality (tenor), and abstraction (mode) in various instantiations of the same
genre (e.g., a spoken anecdote told to a close friend as opposed to a more formal pubic version told when introducing
a speaker at a major conference).
In the remainder of this paper I will expand upon the perspective on genre underpinning this action research, and
address the relationship of genre in this model to realizations in grammar and lexis. The focus will be on mother
tongue education (for English), by way of establishing a platform for the second language learning concerns addressed
elsewhere is this volume.

3. What is genre?

Perhaps the most important point to make about the Sydney School is that its concept of genre is part of a general
model of language and social context informed by systemic functional linguistics (including its application to non-
verbal modalities of communication, reviewed in Martinec, 2005). The most accessible introduction to this theory is
probably Eggins (2004); alongside this, Unsworth (2000) surveys a range of applications. Foundational texts include
Halliday and Greaves (2007) on phonology, Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) on grammar, Martin and Rose (2007a)
on discourse semantics, Martin and Rose (2008) on genre, and Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) on images.
As part of this functional linguistic paradigm, genre theory is developed as an outline of how we use language to
live; it tries to describe the ways in which we mobilize language – how out of all the things we might do with language,
each culture chooses just a few, and enacts them over and over again – slowly adding to the repertoire as needs arise,
and slowly dropping things that are not much use. Genre theory is thus a theory of the borders of our social world, and
our familiarity with what to expect. With apologies to Derrida, one important law of genre is that we cannot not mean
genres (we have to interact in one genre or another in other words). . . and that we almost never feel this as a constraint.
As far as its place in a functional model of language and social context is concerned, genre can be defined as a
recurrent configuration of meanings and a culture as a system of genres. In our educational linguistics work with
teachers we used a more accessible characterization, namely that of genre as a staged goal-oriented social process:

(i) staged: because it usually takes us more than one phase of meaning to work through a genre,
(ii) goal-oriented: because unfolding phases are designed to accomplish something and we feel a sense of frustration
or incompleteness if we are stopped,
(iii) social: because we undertake genres interactively with others.

This perspective on genre is illustrated in Text 1 below, from one of our interventions in a Year 6 (age 11/12) primary
school class of students, most of whose parents were born overseas and who thus spoke English as a second language.
The genre being taught is exposition.
Text 1
Should an amphitheatre be built in Wiley Park? [Filippa]
[1] I strongly believe that the amphitheatre in Wiley Park should be built for these following reasons, such as:
it attracts more people to the area, shops and public transport will earn a larger profit, people will become more
interested in Wiley park, and it is suitable for all ages.
My first reason is that it will bring more people to our area because there are not many main attractions in our
community and it can be something to remember our bi-centenary by in years to come.
Another point to mention is shops will earn more money, for example, the new restaurant which will be built
with in the amphitheatre. And not to forget Public transport which will create more money for the government
and will be more easier for the disabled to travel by if they wish to do so.
And last but not least it is not only for the grown ups but it is also suitable for children for example, there will be
entertainment such as concerts, plays and shows. In my opinion from a child’s point of view I think it is going
to be fun and it is about time the council did something like this.
14 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

Fig. 3. Staging structure of the exposition genre.

I hope I have convinced you that we should have a amphitheatre at Wiley Park.
At this point in their apprenticeship, the students have learned the basic staging structure of the genre (Thesis
followed by Arguments followed by Reiteration of Thesis), and that they need to preview their Arguments in their
Thesis. Their teacher is continuing to work with them in beginning each Argument with a topic sentence bridging
back to the Thesis before developing their point in a paragraph. This staging structure is outlined in Fig. 3, including
informal glosses on the function of each stage and the direction in which it is attempting to develop the genre.
We developed this popularization of genre in tandem with our more theoretical understandings to map curriculum,
initially for primary school, and later on for specific subjects in secondary school. An exemplary typology for secondary
school history genres is outlined in Fig. 4 (Coffin, 1997, 2000, 2006; Martin, 2002; Martin & Rose, 2008). In this
diagram a taxonomy of secondary school history genres is presented. This outline has been scaled from top to bottom
with respect to the distance between the various history genres and spoken genres with which students could reasonably
be expected to be familiar, taking into account factors such as temporal and causal organization, external or internal
conjunction, generic and specific participants, and grammatical metaphor (Martin & Rose, 2007a, 2008). The diagram

Fig. 4. A typology of secondary school history genres.

Fig. 5. Spiral curriculum (learner pathway) for history genres.

can be read as a network of choices, with arrows pointing to important distinctions in social function and semantic
orientation, beginning for example with the distinctions between texts that are chronologically organized according to
the sequence of events they describe (‘field time’) and those which are rhetorically organized in terms of an unfolding
argument.
The cline from genres that resemble familiar spoken genres in some respects to more specialized academic genres
was used as the basis for building learner pathways, in order to facilitate control of reading and writing in each
discipline. A spiral curriculum of this nature for the history genres in Fig. 4 is outlined in Fig. 5 above. Pathways
of this kind make it possible for teachers to plan for what can be assumed, and for students to move from one genre
to another without having to take too much on board. A zone of proximal development can be established, with
teachers providing the scaffolding students need to develop their literacy repertoire. For discussion of the relation of
everyday discourse to the specialized discourse of disciplines in school and professional contexts see Christie and
Martin (2007).
Alongside mapping curriculum, genre theory was also used to design pedagogy (i.e., a new classroom genre
for teaching literacy), drawing on insights into spoken language development in the home (Painter, 1984, 1986,
1991, 1998). Inspired by Painter’s concept of guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience,
Rothery (1989, 1996) worked with teachers and teacher/linguists to design the teaching/learning cycle outlined in
Fig. 6 (Rothery, 1996). The cycle features a deconstruction stage, where models of the target genre are presented,
a joint construction stage, where teachers scribe another model text in the same genre based on suggestions from
students, and an individual construction stage, where students write in a genre for the first time on their own. All
stages involve setting context and building up field (shared knowledge about content) and a critical orientation to
the genre (with respect to its function in the culture). More recently this cycle has been further developed with
an orientation to reading by Rose (Martin, 2006; Martin & Rose, 2005; Rose, 2004), in work which has been
influenced by Gray’s programs for indigenous education (1985, 1987, 1986, 1990). Gray himself draws on neo-
Vygotskyan learning theory, and pays close attention to the importance of shared understandings about content
and the precise nature of teacher questions when interacting with students in relation to reading material. Martin
(1998) discusses the development of this curriculum genre for teaching writing in relation to Bernstein’s (1996)
work on the strength of boundaries between topics and the range of interactions in which teachers and students
engage.

4. The realization of genre in words and structures

In all sectors of schooling, the relationship between genres and the linguistic structures that compose them is an
important consideration. While some progress can be made working with knowledge about genres and their stages alone,
16 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

Fig. 6. Teaching/learning cycle for mentoring genre.

ongoing development and curriculum planning depend on a close monitoring of linguistic features. In classrooms where
knowledge of the language in which genres are composed cannot be assumed, discussing the relation of lexis, grammar,
and discourse structure to genre is inescapable—since the lower level resources have to be brought to consciousness
and taught. It is to this relationship between the global functional patterns of a genre and the linguistic resources which
realize them that we now turn, switching authorial voice as we do so by way of matching the exploratory tenor of this
section of the paper. We will begin with a small text, and ask how it means by making small changes which focus its
critical parameters.
Once upon a time...
[2] A small child asked her father, ‘Why aren’t you with us?’ And her father said: ‘There are other children like
you, a great many of them. . .’ and then his voice trailed off.
It is a sad story (technically an anecdote; Martin & Plum, 1997; Martin & Rose, 2008), about a father who cannot
be with his child. For the change to [21 ], let us switch from past tense to modality (i.e., ability, usuality, probability,
inclination or obligation) in the second clause:

Now the terms of the child’s question have to do with ability rather than time; the question is about why the father
is not able to be home. By adding some more modality in [22 ] we bring the question of the world outside even further
into the picture:

The modality of obligation clarifies that the father was obliged to reply in the terms he did, because, as he indicates,
of his responsibilities outside the home. Two small changes and the father’s struggle is made clear. Now let us add
some explicitly evaluative language to what is going on:
 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21 17

In [23 ] a more formal verbal process, utter, is used to reinforce the gravity of the situation; and the nar-
rator comments on the father’s reply, creating the opportunity to do so by referring to it metadiscursively as
words, and then evaluating it negatively as terrible—an appreciation plausibly shared by both father and child
(for the analysis of evaluation used here see Martin & White, 2005). Using the same strategy we can evaluate
language characterizing not just the father’s reply, but the father/daughter exchange as a whole, and introduce
conflicting appreciations to what is going on (flagging the conflict as we go with the adversative conjunction
yet).

Shifting our attention to nominal and verbal deixis, we can generalize the story, as something that happened
over and over again—not just to a single father and child. Verbally we shift from simple past to simple present to
signal recurring events; nominally we shift from specific to generic reference (in this context from her father to the
father).

And finally let us push the deixis once again (from the to one’s) so that we know that what happened to
many families happened to the narrator, too—and that he personally experienced the feelings about what went
on.

A few small changes, reverberating through the genre, ultimately change its social function. We began in [2] with
a sad story about a father and child, which positioned us to sympathize emotionally. We then used modality to flag
the tension between family obligations and outside commitments, introduced appreciations of this conflict of interest
(as simple yet incomprehensible, and terrible), and adjusted deixis to involve the narrator in a recurring predicament
(drawing on text reference and metadiscursive lexis to orchestrate these changes along the way—it, the moment,
the ... words). In the genre-focused narratology of the Sydney School (Jordens et al., 2001; Martin & Plum, 1997;
Rothery, 1996; Rothery & Stenglin, 1997), these changes accumulate to mark a shift towards another story genre, the
observation. Unlike other story genres, observations telescope events into a relatively compressed time line, and then
evaluate them in terms of their significance as if they were a thing (e.g., a simple incomprehensible moment, the terrible
words).
As far as temporal relations are concerned, where other story genres lead us on a merry chase of tension and
surprise, observations package up what happened as a kind of fait accompli—a piece of history we are positioned to
reflect upon. Attitudinally speaking, where other story genres explicitly inscribe the emotions of characters and make
moral judgements about their behaviour, observations comment retrospectively on the value of experience—what
that experience meant for our lives. For pedagogic purposes I made text [2] more like [26 ] than I should have,
18 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

something I have attempted to adjust below to bring out the contrast between the anecdote and observation story
genres.
anecdote (sharing an emotional reaction to a remarkable event):
[27 ] A small child was playing in her room. She heard a sound at the door, and looking up, there was her father,
who she hadn’t seen for a long time. She ran to him and he picked her up, hugging her closely. ‘Why aren’t you
with us?’ she asked. And her father said: ‘There are other children like you, a great many of them. . .’ and then
his voice trailed off. He did his best to hide the tears in his eyes as he left her room.
observation (reflectively appreciating the significance of events):
[26 ] It was as simple and yet as incomprehensible as the moment a small child asks her father, ‘Why can you
not be with us?’ And the father must utter the terrible words: ‘There are other children like you, a great many of
them. . .’ and then one’s voice trails off.
The point that needs to be emphasized here is that the accumulated changes in meaning reconfigure the
genre—precisely because in the model of language and social context assumed here genres are made of mean-
ings. And these meanings are construed by grammar and lexis, and in turn by the discourse semantic relations
that patterns of grammar and lexis construct. Among other things, because genre is related to lexicogrammar
in this way, it provides a natural context for learning words and structures in second language develop-
ment.
Returning to [26 ], it is Nelson Mandela talking, from the last chapter of his autobiography Long Walk to
Freedom (1995, p. 750). He introduces the story to exemplify a point he is making about the cost of free-
dom:

So looking further afield, the observation is in fact part of a macro-genre, which begins as a report gen-
eralizing the cost of freedom, and then turns to a story genre to drive the pain of sacrifice home. The
configuration of meanings we explored above has fine-tuned the observation for just this purpose—with modal-
ity indexing obligations, appraisal construing reflective empathy, and deixis generalizing the experience as one
involving not just Mandela but many of his comrades as well. Every tiny act of meaning contributes to the
social function of the text as a whole. Nothing is incidental; because the lexicogrammar is construing the
genre.
 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21 19

5. Rounding off

As noted in Section 2, technically speaking genre is a recurrent configuration of meanings and a culture is a
system of genres. In this paper an attempt has been made to demonstrate these points by switching from analysis to
synthesis, and deriving one real text from an imaginary other. Along the way consideration was given to how linguistic
resources for tense, modality, nominal deixis, attitude, metadiscourse, conjunction, and text reference contributed to
observation Mandela in fact deployed—thereby illustrating the sense in which in SFL genres can be treated as recurrent
configurations of meaning.
In passing four genres were canvassed—exposition, anecdote, observation, and report (two factual and two story
genres). In addition attention was directed to how the observation and report were combined by Mandela into a macro-
genre (the former dramatizing the point of the latter); and suggestions were introduced by means of an outline of history
genres for strategies for modelling regions of our culture (i.e., secondary school history) as families of genres—thereby
illustrating the sense in which SFL can model cultures as systems of genres.
Also noted was the use of genre theory to design new genres (i.e., new teaching practices), drawing on Halliday
and Painter’s language based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993, 2003; Painter, 1986, 1991, 1998), as illustrated by the
curriculum macro-genre (the teaching/learning cycle) developed to scaffold literacy learning in primary and secondary
school.
Analysis and synthesis of this kind has been enabled throughout this research by the systemic functional model of
language in which we situate genre. The practical power of a model of this kind has yet to be fully explored for L2
learning contexts. If these explorations prove as theoretically productive as those in L1 contexts, then we have a great
deal to look forward to as a new region of theory/practice dialectic unfolds. Two areas that invite special consideration
are (i) renovation of the pedagogy to incorporate a focus on teaching grammar and lexis, and graphology and phonology
to students developing their meaning potential on these strata; and (ii) renovation of the pedagogy to include a focus
on spoken discourse, taking into account the multimodal contexts in which dialogue naturally occurs. I look forward
with great anticipation to the challenges of the action research which lies ahead.
20 J.R. Martin / Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 10–21

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