A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Language and Linguistic Patterns of One Genre and the Implications for Language Teaching

There has been considerable interest in using a genre-based approach to the teaching of language. Genre has been described as a property of texts which allows them to be described as a sequence of segments, or “moves,” with each move accomplishing some part of the overall communicative purpose of the text, while register can be thought of as the language and linguistic patterns of one particular genre. The purpose of this study was to find out whether the registers of different moves of one genre can be very different from each other. A corpus of 44 typical examples of the genre, “Brief Tourist Information,” was created. A computerized concordancing program was used to analyze the three moves, “Location,” “Facilities/ Activities,” and “Description” in terms of discourse functions, length, reader address, modality, idioms, lexical phrases, and common lexical items. A comparison of the structures and lexical items of the three moves showed clearly that while they shared a few functions, for the most part they differed substantially. The results suggest that language educators should consider 1) basing instructional materials on corpora of texts in use, 2) teaching the move structure of genres and the concomitant move registers rather than the general register of the genre as a whole, 3) integrating the teaching of reading and writing, and 4) adopting a “purpose approach” to the teaching of writing.