HOW IS THE DIGITAL MEDIUM SHAPING RESEARCH GENRES? SOME CROSS-DISCIPLINARY TRENDS

There is little dispute that technologies are impacting academic communication today, rendering new forms of accessing information and disseminating knowledge. To explore this impact, in the first part of the paper I review a selection of scholarly literature that addresses ways in which digital technologies are shifting the scholars’ information access behavior and introducing new forms of research dissemination. I also discuss how these new forms of communication are modeling new ecologies of genre systems and genre sets. In the second part of the paper I conduct genre analysis with a sample corpus of texts from different disciplines to illustrate how the emergence of new multimedia genres and the use of multimodality, hypertextuality and interdiscursivity features in genres within electronic environments appear to be pointing at generic evolution and innovation. In light of the findings, I propose some areas in which genre research can engage in interdisciplinary conversation (with ethnography, academic/digital literacies studies, situated genre analysis and reception studies). Regarding EAP instruction, I suggest a pedagogy that provides corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical input on the new genre formats, opportunities for noticing, hands-on practice and critical awareness of aspects of genre innovation and change.