Analysing newspaper genres with a view to developing a genre-based pedagogy for the teaching of writing in Hong Kong schools

Abstract

The thesis explores the practicability of the use of newspaper genres in a genre-based pedagogy to equip students with the various types of knowledge they need for successful production of school genres, such as arguments, narratives, and reports, as well as to facilitate transfer of genre knowledge and skills from one text or genre to another. The study addresses the writing problems of ESL learners in Hong Kong Schools. It is an attempt to design an alternative to the present curriculum to create a pedagogy that incorporates the use of newspapers genres as authentic reading materials through a series of metalinguistic activities, including intertextual and interdiscursive experiences. The genre-based approach used here is different from the ones that use parallel texts. It is one that uses authentic newspaper articles, from which linguistic data and genre knowledge are expected to be transferred to new texts of other targeted school curriculum genres. The thesis confines to three newspaper genres, namely news stories, editorials and letters to the editor, as they are considered pedagogically utilisable for learning to write school genres. These genres are examined in detail for their use of lexico-grammatical resources and generic conventions in relation to contextual factors. Besides prototypicalities, variations within genres are also investigated, paying particular attention to subtypes within these newspaper genres. The analysis demonstrates correlations between newspaper genres, the communicative purposes they serve, and the typical lexico-grammatical resources they employ to achieve these purposes; however, it also brings into focus pedagogically insightful variations in the choice of lexico-grammatical resources because of the variations in topics and the corresponding variations in rhetorical moves. The thesis therefore claims that the main purpose of any genre-based pedagogy should not be to transmit generic recipes, but to sensitise students to form-function relationships, on the one hand, and to the knowledge of content and rhetorical as well as institutional context, on the other. The thesis also compares typical representations of the three newspaper genres and school genres. The comparisons reveal the extent to which they overlap and differ from each other in terms of their use of rhetorical and lexico-grammatical features. The comparative analysis provides necessary evidence to shows how these two different sets of genres, one professional and the other academic, can be pedagogically exploited to make students aware of the overlaps as well as the differences in rhetorical purposes, and the use of lexico-grammatical resources, through purposeful language activities and critical genre analysis. This is also supported by the findings of a pilot study in which a writing course was designed for a group of Secondary Six students in Hong Kong. The thesis thus recommends some basic tenets for a flexible writing curriculum, a framework that integrates genre approach, process approach and theme-based approach, a genre instruction cycle, a 3-dimensional analytical model, and a language awareness and competence development model. It emphasises the necessity to develop students’ linguistic awareness so that they can cope with new genres and new situations and the common practice of mixing genres in real life discursive activities in today’s world.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2005
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Vijay Kumar BHATIA (Supervisor)