Genres and Genre Theory: A Response to Michael Rosen

This paper responds to Michael Rosen’s blog entries, ‘How Genre Theory Saved the World’, arguing that genre theory in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has made an important contribution to language and literacy pedagogy. It emerged in the Australian context in about 1980 and was initially developed in response to educational theories that tended to focus on ‘processes of learning’ and the role of the teacher as ‘facilitator’ only of these processes. This was at the expense of more structured and goal-directed language curricula which provide guidance and support to language and literacy learners, especially in learning to write. Genre theory, supported by extensive research using the SF grammar, identifies certain elemental genres for teaching; they are canonical because each is part of an assemblage of related genres, which successful students learn to manipulate, playing with them and adapting them for their own purposes. Learning the genres of a culture is part of learning how that culture means.