34.828, Review: Applied Linguistics, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Pérez-Llantada (2021)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-828. Fri Mar 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 34.828, Review: Applied Linguistics, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Pérez-Llantada (2021)
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Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 01:15:57
From: Dominique Dias [Dominique.Dias at univ-grenoble-alpes.fr]
Subject: Research Genres Across Languages
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2658.html
AUTHOR: Carmen Pérez-Llantada
TITLE: Research Genres Across Languages
SUBTITLE: Multilingual Communication Online
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Dominique Dias, Université de Grenoble - Alpes
SUMMARY
This monograph is one of the results of a project funded by the Spanish
Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Social Fund aiming to
describe and analyze genres that academics use in their professional
practices. In this book, Carmen Pérez-Llantada discusses the impact of Web 2.0
on research genres and focuses on the STEMM sciences (science, technology,
engineering, mathematics and medicine). She investigates the interdependence
of traditional and emerging genres, considering also the fact that science
communication occurs often in a multilingual context. The book is made up of
seven chapters each one with a different perspective from a theoretical one to
others with some pedagogical considerations.
Chapter 1, “Research Genres in Context” is a long introduction that positions
research genres in changing technological and social contexts. In the opening
remarks, the author explains that her aim is to show the interdependence of
traditional and emerging research genres. By genre, she does not simply mean a
categorization of text types, but a social way of recognizing and responding
to recurrent situations. Her methodology for conducting genre research is
based on Swale’s genre analysis and focuses on two specific issues. The first
one is the impact of internet-mediated communication on the dynamics of
knowledge production and distribution. In order to describe this phenomenon,
Pérez-Llantada refers to the concept of “context collapse” (Marwick and boyd
2011) that describes the fact that digital media makes different audiences and
contexts collapse into one. The polycontextuality of digital media has
necessarily an impact on the techniques used to communicate online. To explain
the role of a genre and the emergence of new ones, the author refers to the
theory of structuration proposed by Anthony Giddens (1986) according to which
social interaction practices lie at the intersection of structures and agents.
An example to illustrate this relation between structures and agents is the
case of genres related to science education. Scientific contents distributed
via digital media such as academic social networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate
or Academia.edu) or microblogging sites (e.g. Twitter) tend to inform and
trigger debates about science with broader audiences. This can contribute to
shaping research genres in accordance with new social demands such as making
science more trust-worthy to non-expert audiences. In addition to the
affordances of Web 2.0, Pérez-Llantada raises the issue of multilingual
science production and dissemination, which she considers has been so far
under-researched.
After this introducing chapter, Chapter 2 entitled “Theories and metaphors”
begins with a review of genre research in the past decade that relies on
Swale’s conception of genre. It has already been pointed out that research
genres have been evolving as a result of new dynamics emerging in the social
organization of the scientific community. In this respect, a relevant concept
is that of generic hybrids. This concept refers to the fact that new genres
take often the form of already existing genres that are adapted to a new
environment, especially when it comes to digital genres. That is the reason
why Pérez-Llantada uses the metaphor of genres as biological species, borrowed
by Swale from Fishelov (1993): genres form an ecosystem, i.e. an
interdependent system of genres that evolve because they are continually being
shaped and negotiated by their users. This ecosystem is all the more complex
because it is multilingual. Especially on the web, boundaries between
languages have become fuzzier since it is easier to engage with multilingual
audiences. To describe these multilingual genre ecologies, Pérez-Llantada
coins the concepts of “language collisions” (the academic ecosystem is a site
of competing genres with English as shared lingua franca) and “language
collusion” (local communities can contribute in their own language to global
knowledge). Digital genres such as blogs are a relevant example for
multilingual science communication.
Chapter 3 (“Science, Genres and Social Action”) examines the role of genre
research in light of broader social theories like Gidden’s structuration
theory or Russel’s activity theory in order to show how genres are part of
social systems. Pérez-Llantada explains for instance that according to
Russel’s activity theory (1995), genres are mediational tools. Activity theory
describes human behavior in terms of activity systems. Those systems are
conceptualized as goal-directed, historically-situated and cooperative
interactions. Research genres are in activity systems tools to reach a
specific goal, but these tools are continually transformed by their use. In
other words, genre analysts cannot focus only on the tool, but they have to
consider – among others – political, economic, social agendas on the one hand,
and the participants on the other hand to understand how communicative
repertoires are shaped and how they evolve. In Gidden’s theory, this
corresponds for instance to the concepts of structure and agents, as already
described in the first chapter. Whatever the social theory in which her
definition of genre fits, Pérez-Llantada considers the Web 2.0 as a decisive
driver of innovation and change that tends to reconfigure the relation between
agent, structure and tool.
Chapter 4, entitled “Language Diversity in Genred Activity”, focuses on
multilingualism in academic and research settings. The author refers to the
term “languaging” to denote the language diversity in people’s discursive
practices and she uses the term “polylanguaging” to describe the use of
several languages from the individual’s linguistic repertoires. It appears
that the nature and the diversity of the polylanguaging depends on the context
and on situational factors. The choice of a language can correspond to a
function: in the STEMM disciplines, English is often used when addressing
experts and the local language when addressing the non-expert audience. The
use of two languages simultaneously is also possible, for instance to
distinguish between scientific and interpersonal interactions. Pérez-Llantada
notes besides that the use of English is already a case of polylanguaging.
World Englishes coexist with several academic Englishes, all of which are
equally legitimate and should not be considered as defective forms. The author
argues that polylanguaging needs to be theorized in a more explicit manner in
genre research because it is associated with parascientific genres on the web,
targeting non-specialist audiences and making science more trustable for
society.
Chapter 5 (“Genres and Multiliteracies”) highlights didactic considerations
about the skills needed to compose traditional and emerging digital genres in
one or more languages. The activity of creating academic texts requires
specific skills and involves strategic choices. The author borrows from the
didactics of Languages for Academic Purposes the notions of critical moments
of interaction and critical sites of engagement to describe how novice
researchers acquire new skills. In genre research, it is generally assumed
that genre knowledge is acquired by perceptions of responses to recurring
situational demands. The role played by the Internet and the new technological
affordances in the evolution of genres has necessarily an impact on literacy
development processes. For instance, some traditional skills are transferred
to emerging genres, which is conceptualized as strategies of
interdiscursivity. Genre knowledge also contains specific aspects of cultural
context that need to be taken into account by researchers when targeting
different languages and cultures. In other words, genre knowledge has a
cognitive, but also a sociocultural dimension, which is particularly obvious
in the case of an import of genres to another culture. All the aforementioned
aspects suppose a multiliteracy in genre practices in order to compose a wide
repertoire of research genres.
Chapter 6, entitled “Innovation and Change in Genre-Based Pedagogies”,
outlines teaching proposals involving genre-based approaches to Languages for
Academic Purposes. The author identifies three main challenges in learning and
mastering digital genres: ensuring clarity in the message conveyed, overcoming
knowledge asymmetries of audiences with different knowledge backgrounds or
perceptions, and building trust and credibility with lay audiences. Building
on the well-known cycle of rhetorical consciousness-raising, Pérez-Llantada
proposes a pedagogical approach consisting of four interrelated modules. These
modules contain strategies of metacognition and aim at raising awareness of
genre change in the processes of genre remediation. Her method also shows how
and why genres in digital environments create interrelationships among them.
Generally speaking, this chapter sheds light on how results from corpus
research and exploratory qualitative research can help conceive teaching
material.
In the last chapter, “The Way Ahead”, the author draws several conclusions
reminding the reader how unprecedented technological advances have given rise
to digital genres and have deeply modified science communication. She admits
that one of the limits to this research area is that emerging genres are not
fully stabilized within the STEMM scientific community and are therefore hard
to examine. Digital genres have in any case built new information access
paths. As possibilities for future research, Pérez-Llantada proposes to
examine further multimodal genres, because they offer the scientific community
complex ways of composing multilayered texts. Interdiscursivity is also a
research area that should be further explored according to the author. The
affordances of Web 2.0 provide dynamic forms of dialogic encounters such as
informal discussion among peers. All these considerations show that several
research gaps remain, which need a robust analytical framework that this book
proposes to outline.
EVALUATION
By introducing a participative dimension that leads users to produce content
and interact with each other on different platforms, Web 2.0 has indeed
significantly changed the way knowledge is produced and disseminated. The main
contribution of this book is to think about these changes in the lens of
research genres. Genres are not simply considered here as a list of defining
parameters to describe written productions, but they are theorized by
Pérez-Llantada in their social and professional dimensions. The book thus
provides an understanding of what genres are used by academics in their
everyday professional practices and how their evolution impacts the scientific
community. The metaphor of genre as an ecosystem as described in Chapter 2 is
very enlightening in this respect.
The book is an excellent introduction to genre issues. It is based on a
substantial bibliography and on a rigorous methodology. In addition to this
theoretical foundation, the book proposes several possibilities for the
practical use of the results, particularly in terms of learning and teaching.
Some aspects of the book sometimes make it difficult to read: despite the
presence of a list of abbreviations at the beginning of the book, their
recurrent use, particularly in Chapters 1 and 2, tends to make reading
difficult. Moreover, although the author systematically illustrates her
theoretical demonstrations with empirical examples, it is not always easy to
grasp their significance. But this is due more to the large size of the corpus
and to the nature of the object of study: it is inevitably more difficult to
illustrate generic than micro-structural phenomena.
These remarks do not, however, overshadow the interest of the book, which
updates research on genre. One of the undeniable merits of the book is the
consideration of multilingualism, which is not limited to the use of English
as a lingua franca in STEMM disciplines. English and its different variants
certainly play an undeniable role in the construction of knowledge, but its
dissemination and acquisition must be considered in a multilingual world. This
a point that the author demonstrates perfectly and with very relevant examples
(notably in Chapter 4).
The structure of the book is coherent insofar as it provides an overview of
different issues related to research genres: their nature, their role in
science and society, their multilingual dimension, and the question of their
learning. Beyond these different considerations, the author proposes several
areas of research for future studies, both empirical and theorical. One can
only agree with her: the plurilingual dimension of research genres still
deserves to be further explored, especially beyond the STEMM disciplines. The
multimodal dimension of research genres is also central to the dissemination
of knowledge and certainly requires new skills in both the production and
reception of knowledge. This book is intended for students who can gain a rich
overview of the issue and for specialists interested in current research genre
issues.
REFERENCES
Fishelov, David. 1993. Metaphors of genre. The role of analogies in genre
theory. University Park: Penn State University Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1986. The constitution of society. Outline of the theory of
structuration. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press.
Marwick, Alice & danah boyd. 2011. “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately”:
Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New medias and
Society 13. 96-113.
Russel, David. 1995. Activity theory and its implications for writing
instruction. In Petraglia, Joseph (ed.), Reconceiving writing, Rethinking
writing instruction. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan press. 210-225.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dominique Dias teaches Germanic Linguistics at Université Grenoble Alpes,
France. He is a member of the research unit, ILCEA4, which deals with foreign
cultures and languages. His research interests lie in text linguistics, text
genres, metadiscourses and the German media.
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