In my first lecture on genre-based pedagogy, we tried out a fun method using genre-based approach that is using horoscope as an example. Horoscope is a genre type. It consists of two sub-genres. One is the description genre. One is the procedural text genre. So it's just to give you a taste of what genre-based approach to teaching is. Today in this second lecture on genre-based pedagogy, we will go a little bit deeper into the theory so that you can become more flexible about how to design a genre-based pedagogy, a genre-based lesson. So let's dive into it. Before we talk about the genre theories, I'd like to mention briefly this continuum between soft clue and hard clue. So this is a term first used in Europe. I'll explain what is soft, what is hard. It's not killing you softly. So soft clue is taught by language teachers like you, language teachers. And you can be trained in applied linguistics and you don't need to be trained in any specific content area like history or science or geography or social studies. And hard clue is taught by content teachers trained in the different disciplines like biology, history, economics, social studies.

In the situation of Taiwan, most of the teachers practicing clue come from language background, language education. They're trained as language teachers. So why is genre-based pedagogy especially useful in the soft clue situation? Because basically soft clue is content-based language education. That is, we use content to drive the learning of language because the content is interesting, because the content is meaningful. And instead of focusing on grammar, which is in isolated context, the grammar that is used for learning is the grammar that is used to express the content meaning. So basically genre-based pedagogy is to say that first of all we find out about the genre, the text type of the content topic, and then we design a lesson which is rich with language support. We teach the language patterns, the language features, vocabulary, which will be useful to express the genre, the text type. The text type can be spoken text type, written text type, a text type which is useful for communicating the content meanings, the content topics. So I would like to introduce you to Michael Halliday and his wife Rekia Hassan.

Both were professors in the University of Sydney in Australia. I'd like to introduce you to this term called register theory. Register actually is not difficult to understand because in Chinese we have all kinds of registers. In any language we have all kinds of registers, like a sports register, like a legal register, like a cookery register. So for any specific content domain, whether you're talking about soccer or basketball or sports, or you're talking about cookery or different kind of cuisine, so you will come with different vocabulary.

So a register is a variety of a language or you could think of it as a subset of a language.

Okay, so every language can have many different registers suited for different content topics or content domain topics used for a particular purpose in a particular social situation.

And there are three dimensions, three factors we need to consider which shape the register.

So field is what is the topic, what's the subject matter, are you talking about sports, are you talking about politics, are you talking about history, are you talking about science, right? So the field will shape the kind of vocabulary and the kind of sentence patterns that you will use to communicate these content meanings. Then the tenor who are involved in the communicative situation, are these participants in more or less egalitarian, that is horizontal, their relationship, so that will be less formal and more casual. Or if the social distance is more hierarchical, then you'll be more polite or more formal. So it will also shape your choices of vocabulary and your choices of grammatical sentence patterns.

And then the mode is whether it's spoken mode or written mode and sometimes it's in between in a digital mode. So basically it's spoken text or written text mode. So if you consider the topic, the content, subject matter and the social distance, the formality between the participants in the communication context and also whether it's a spoken mode or written mode. So all these will control or shape our linguistic choices, our language features.

So we need to teach students, we need to teach students to change their vocab, to change their sentence patterns according to the register that is appropriate for the content topic, for the domain of content meanings that they are communicating. So that's the register.

And then genre is a related concept and it is defined as a staged, meaning it goes through different stages, goal-oriented, meaning when we organize our text, when we go through the different stages, we want to achieve a coherent primary communicative purpose. So a genre typically goes through different rhetorical stages, that is the organizations, the textual stages in a piece of text, spoken text or written text, to achieve its primary goal or social purpose. So for example, right now, what is the register I'm using? I'm talking about language education topics, so the field is education, language education, so I use a lot of vocabulary related to language education, linguistics or teaching methodologies. A tenor is, I'm a colleague of you because you are teachers, I'm also a teacher, I work with teachers, I'm a teacher educator. So the tenor is more or less in between very formal and very informal, but I haven't met you, and so it's in between very formal and very informal. So you would notice that I would use the spoken mode and I have lots of contractions, shortened forms, so it's in between like a textbook, very formal mode of communication, or the very casual mode of spoken conversation between friends, casual conversation between friends. So this is a diagram to represent genres and registers, they are very culture specific. So in western cultures, usually when you present your argument, you need to start with your argument right from the beginning. But in many eastern cultures, we go through a roundabout way, we don't put forward our position, our argument right at the beginning. We might put about examples and so on, and then finally we reach our conclusion. So this is just an example to show the cultural specific features of genres.

So situation is, who are the participants? What is their social relationship? Is it more or less egalitarian, horizontal relationship, or hierarchical? The social distance is quite huge, so that we need to be very formal. And the spoken written mode, the subject matter. Subject matter usually will control the choice of vocabulary, sometimes also the sentence patterns. And all of these form the specific shape of the register, and that will help your students to create a text appropriate to the communicative situation, to communicate a kind of content meanings appropriately.

So Professor Dara Rehanker from University of Sydney, she talks about texts are organized and constructed in different ways according to their genre, the purpose, and register. What is the content field? What's the social relations among, between the reader and speaker, the reader and writer, and the speaker and listener, and original or spoken mode? The genre shapes the overall organization or structuring of the text, whereas the register, whereas the register shapes your choice of vocabulary, lexical vocabulary, and grammatical patterns, the sentence patterns, and choices made in constructing the text. So basically when we communicate, we make the sentence, right? So using vocabulary choices and sentence pattern, but we organize our sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into a coherent text. So genre and register, these are two concepts to help us to understand how we can design our genre, our text, according to the situation, and according to the register, which would be useful. I'll give you an example, so don't worry about these two concepts, genre and register theories. They are actually very useful. So here are two texts from real-life conversations and communication, and let's read the text and analyze their genre and their register. So the first text is a conversation between

Angel and Adrian. Hello, Adrian. Good morning, Angel. How are you today? I'm fine. I've been up for a couple of hours working on my computer. Oh, that's good. Are there lessons for me to see today? Miss Busy hasn't replied to my email yet. Don't know if she's got something arranged.

I see. In that case, I'd like to stay home to work this morning, and if she's got back to you, just give me a call and I'll come back to school. No problem. Have a productive day.

Thanks, Adrian. You have a good day, too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Now let's analyze what kind of, what are Adrian and Angel talking about? So we are talking about the field.

What's the subject matter? What's the content topic? What do you think? Are they talking about arranging a holiday or arranging a camping? What are they talking about? They seem to be talking about arranging seeing lessons, right? Observing lessons. So it looks like they are educators involved in some kind, arranging some kind of work event. What's the role relationship?

Are they family members or are they colleagues? Looks like they are colleagues. Looks like they are very friendly to each other. So the relationship is more or less horizontal.

Looks like they are not like one is a boss, one is a subordinate. It's not like that.

It's like it's more horizontal. So you can see it's pretty informal, but still it's pretty polite.

And what's the channel? It's a spoken conversation. It is a telephone conversation.

And what's the purpose, the holistic purpose? Is it just to chit-chat, to asking how you are, how are you? Is it just to socialize? No, actually the main purpose is not just to socialize. Socializing is just part of it. The main purpose is to get something done, right? Is to arrange a lesson observation for Angel. And is this taught organized into stages?

You see the genre, genre meaning a text type is organized into different stages. Yes, it is.

Let's see how, let's analyze it. The first stage is, hello Adrian, good morning Angel. This is greetings, social niceties and casual talk. How are you today, right? And then now going into the real business. Are there lessons for me to see? So this is a request for information, this response offering information. And then give me a call, okay? Request for action when Miss Boosie gets back to you. No problem. It's promising that I will, I will offer the response. I will, I will give you, I will give you the action. And closing, social niceties. See, even a very short one minute conversation, a spoken text is very well organized. Even though it's very spontaneous, it's not scripted. But people follow predictable stages. You don't just start, hey, are there lessons for me to see today? No. You first go through the social niceties.

So, and then you close, you don't say, okay, goodbye. Okay. You have some social niceties, have a good day before you say goodbye. So, and then in between these two social niceties stages of opening and closing, you have the real business, request for information, offering information, request for action, promise to return the action. So the field is arranging a lesson observation. And the tenor, the social relationship is between colleagues, horizontal relationship. So it's not very formal, but still polite. Informal but polite.

And the mode is spoken. Purpose of this genre is to arrange, arrange a work, a work event and request for information and action is the workplace request. And the structure of the stages is the first stage is greetings, social niceties, opening casual talk, request for information, response, request for action, response, and closing remarks, social niceties again.

Right? So if we analyze any, you can analyze any piece of text, spoken text, written text for students like this. For example, this is a piece of written text from a, from a grade four science textbook from Thailand. Let's look at this. What is this text about, right? Flowering plants are categorized as high class plants. At the adult stage, the plants produce flowers, which can develop into fruits and seeds after being pollinated and fertilized. Rose, hibiscus, sunflower, mango, banana, and papaya are flowering plants. So what is the field of this register? It's about flowering plants, right? So it's kind of like biology, the subject matter, the content topic is flowering plants. What's the world relationship between the writer and the reader? Do they know each other? It sounds like they are more formal, their relationship. They are socially quite distant from each other. And it's kind of hierarchical. The writer is like the expert.

The reader is kind of like a student. So it's a bit formal and they don't know each other.

And who's likely to be author? We just mentioned that, the expert and the student. The channel is a written medium. You can't see your audience when you're writing for someone you cannot see, someone you haven't met, as you are not writing for your friend. So it's a bit formal.

The purpose of this text is to inform the reader about, to describe the flowering plants, right?

Is it organized into stages? Let's analyze this text. Yes, it seems to be organized into stages, even a very short one paragraph text. We can look at this. First of all, the technical term, the biological term, flowering plants is introduced by classifying it. Flowering plants are categorized as high cost plants. So you introduce a technical term by classifying it.

And then you have a description. At the adult stage, the plants produce flowers.

And then you have examples. So even for this very short text, it's highly organized, highly coherent. It goes through the different stages to inform you about this topic, the flowering plants. So again, we can analyze the register. The field is school science, flowering plants, a topic. The tenor, so you can see the vocabulary is largely related to flowering plants, to science. The writer and the reader, they are not really friends. The relationship is kind of hierarchical. So it's a little bit impersonal, a bit formal, a bit cold, formal. And the mode is written text. The purpose is to provide information on a specific topic, flowering plants. And it's a text type genre. You can understand genre as text type.

In Chinese, we call it yu ti. Genre is yu ti. It's a text type. It's an information report.

The purpose is to inform you, to describe the flowering plants, this topic to you.

The structure is introduction of this topic by classifying this topic, followed by, this means followed by a description, and the description is followed by examples. So it goes through predictable stages. You can expect information report. So we can, this is actually very useful to teach students if they can change flowering plants to non-flowering plants, for example.

They can change a topic, but they can follow this different sequence of stages, and they can write an information report on a topic. For example, if Taiwan is famous for Taiwan, what is Taiwan famous for? What kind of flowers or what kind of fruits is Taiwan? Or what kind of birds? So students can be engaged to write an information report on a special topic. What about fruits in Taiwan?

Summer fruits, I mean, summer fruits in Taiwan.

So now we can compare. This is important to help to raise students' awareness of the different features of everyday register from academic register. So everyday registers, for example, text one, conversations, usually no technical terms. But academic text, usually you have technical or more academic terms. And for everyday communication, you can use a lot of personal pronouns because the social distance is close. But for school text, academic text, usually the social distance is not so close, maybe more hierarchical, so we seldom directly use personal pronouns. Simple sentence structures for everyday conversations, more complex like relative clauses, right? Complex sentence patterns for academic school text. Shortened forms, exclamations, hesitations, usually. We have more of these in communication when the social relationship is more casual, more horizontal. The students need to be alerted to these, otherwise they will be speaking like a book, like a textbook, right? So when they write in an academic context, it's usually more formal. When they write a story, write a drama script, write a conversation that is more casual and it's a different style, it's a different register.

So I'm saying that we are learning English as an additional language, right? Students in Taiwan, in Asia. So we need to help our students to understand, to have a meta-language to talk about language. We call this meta-language awareness so that they know, okay, this is a formal style, this is an informal style, this is a more academic register, this is less, this is everyday register. So these linguistic terms are helpful, even for our students, so that they can analyze future genres and future text types and future registers themselves. And this is very useful when they come across different text types, different genres, when they encounter different content topics. So implications for CREO is when language is used in authentic context, then it's not just one single homogeneous style or register. You will expect students to come across different genres, different registers, right? So if they understand, oh, I can analyze any text I come across, I won't be afraid of these. I can analyze, what's the field, that is a topic, what's the tenor, that is the social relations of the participation, participants in the conversation or in the communication, and what's the mode, written mode, spoken mode. Then students, their meta-linguistic awareness, they can analyze text for themselves, and then they can write appropriate text for appropriate communication situations themselves.

So that's what we are saying, the genre selection for the social purpose and the register will shape your linguistic choices, meaning vocabulary choices, sentence patterns choices.

So I've written the whole book on this and more topics in CREO, and I'm happy to send you an electronic copy. I have a hard copy and an electronic copy, I can send you an e-copy if you email me. And in the book, I talk about vocabulary, sentence patterns, functions, and text types. Text types, we can roughly use text types to refer to genres, genres UT, and then the context, the context in which you're communicating. So now I have used up the time for this mini lecture, and I have some examples, some applications with the activity sheets, and your workshop facilitator, your mentor, will facilitate you and will help you to discuss and to do the examples and activities. So feel free to email me, I have my email on my PowerPoint, and I will send you, I'll send you an e-copy of my book. Okay, bye!