Genres of schooling according to the Sydney School: purposes, structures and textual instantiations

Abstract

This paper offers an introduction to the genres of schooling, as a means of supporting teachers with the implementation of genre-based approaches to reading and writing. To this end, it adopts the theoretical and methodological principles of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and, more precisely, of the genre studies of the so called “Sydney School”. The paper defines the concept of genre, introduces a classification system for the genres of schooling, organized according to social and communicative purposes, discusses the structure of the genres and briefly examines the topic of non-canonical or mixed texts. The paper follows closely the descriptions proposed in two seminal works within the Sydney School, Martin & Rose (2008) and Rose & Martin (2012), adapting and illustrating them with original data from the Portuguese context, collected within the project “Texts, Genres and Knowledge – towards the mapping of disciplinary language uses in different levels of education”, carried out at CELGA-ILTEC, research institute in general and applied lin­guistics of the University of Coimbra. As argued in the paper, knowledge of the different genres and their features, namely of their social and communicative purposes and their structural realization, forms the base for pedagogic interventions that incorporate genres into the teaching and learning process.