Call for Proposals—Special Issue of Journal of English for Academic Purposes

25 Years of “Genre Analysis”

The Past and Possible Futures of Genre Analysis

Guest editors: Zak Lancaster, Laura Aull, and Moisés Damián Perales-Escudero

The Journal of English for Academic Purposes is excited to announce a special edition in Summer/Fall of 2015 in honor of the 25th anniversary of John Swales’s Genre Analysis. Genre Analysis was instrumental in bringing to the forefront of genre-based scholarship concepts like communicative purpose, use and development of genres within discourse communities, rhetorical move analysis, instructional approaches focused on text-task interrelations, and the relative stability of some genres over others. The 25-year anniversary of John’s book marks a time to take stock of these influential concepts. How have they been used, applied, expanded, refined, or even misunderstood in genre studies and genre-based pedagogies? How do they complement or depart from other traditions and approaches to genre study and genre instruction?

To this end, we invite proposals for articles that explore questions such as the following, as well as others related to the topic of genre theory, analysis, and teaching:

• How has the emphasis on communicative purposes in John’s work made the ESP tradition both distinct from and commensurable with other traditions of genre?
• What are future possibilities for move analysis as a theoretical and analytic construct? To what extent is the concept of moves still relevant? Is it time to “move on” from move analysis (if so, in what ways?), or how might this construct be further developed or applied?
• To what extent are the genre traditions identified by Sunny Hyon (1996), among others, useful for genre researchers? In 2013-2015, what are the various “schools” or approaches or traditions? How do these traditions overlap and part ways?
• What are useful ways for thinking about the relationships between genre theory, genre analysis (or detailed discourse studies of genre), and genre instruction?
• What possibilities are afforded by combined qualitative and quantitative methods, or by one and not the other? What do corpus methods bring to genre analysis?
• What does genre theory and analysis offer for approaches to literacy instruction in K-12 contexts as opposed to university contexts?
• What are productive uses of genre-based instruction for listening, speaking, and reading?
• What does the notion of genre offer for exploring the relationships between community expectations/goals and the individual writer or reader?
• What tensions exist between an instructional focus on genre awareness, on the one hand, and an instructional focus on genre production, on the other?
• How have the constructs pertaining to genre analysis been taken up, or not, by scholars in Second Language Acquisition (SLA)? What are the implications, if any, of genre analysis for first- and second-language acquisition theory and research?
• How have genre-based curricula developed, and how might they further evolve?
• To what extent have the same or like arguments in Genre Analysis been eroded by time and by later research?
• What has been the impact of the book on the educational practices in a particular country?

In more general terms, we are seeking articles from scholars throughout the world that carefully examine how some of the key ideas in Genre Analysis have been applied, expanded, or critiqued. We also seek articles that explore the different ways of conceptualizing and applying genre analysis that are currently in conversation with each other.

Timeline

Deadline for proposals:                       January 20, 2014

Notification of Acceptances:              February 3, 2014

Completed manuscripts due:              July 11, 2014

Final versions due:                              March, 2015

Special issue Release:              Summer/Fall 2015

Proposal Format: Please submit a one-page proposal; the proposal may include justification of your topic and theoretical base on which you will draw, and your plans for the structure of your article. Proposals and manuscripts should follow APA documentation style, which is the standard for the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Send your proposal electronically (in MS Word format) to guest editors Zak Lancaster (lancasci@wfu.edu), Laura L. Aull (aulll@wfu.edu), and Moisés Damián Perales-Escudero (musadayan@gmail.com). Please be sure to include your full contact information.