Genre and English for Specific Purposes

In English for specific purposes (ESP) genre studies, the discourse structure of texts is typically described as being made up of a series of moves, each of which may contain one or more steps. There has been an important shift in ESP genre studies from looking at language use, in general, to the use of language in specific settings and in specific genres. ESP researchers have also begun to consider multimodality in digital genres and have made proposals for how genre analysis can be extended to account for the characteristics of non-linear, multimodal, web-mediated documents. A key influence in rhetorical genre studies is the Miller's notion of "genre as social action." Genre-based teaching emerged as a response to the process approach to teaching writing with teachers and researchers arguing that process-based teaching does not address issues such as the requirements of particular writing tasks and variation in individual writing situations. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.