Genre, schemata and acquisition – Swales

The concept of schemata was introduced by Bartlett as long ago as 1932 to explain how the
information carried in stories is rearranged in the memories of readers and listeners to fit in with
their expectations.

Our prior knowledge consists of two main components: our assimilated direct experiences of like
and its manifold activities, both types of experiences contribute to our accumulated store of facts
and concepts. These sources will provide background knowledge about the content area of a
discourse, which in turn allows is to evaluate propositions in terms of their truth, and contributed
to the evaluation of appropriacy and relevance. Cognitive activities of this kind are thus
invocations of content schemata. The enable us to accept or reject statements such as “Mexico
City is the largest city in the world” or “Marilyn Monroe was a great singer”. As Widdowson has
shown, it is content schemata that explain the fact that certain apparently empty and tautologous
statements can have meaning. Statements like:

The Law is the Law. It invokes both a literal and an interpretive schema so that the second
instantiation somehow glosses the first: The system of legal rules in an imposed and elaborate
system (but don’t expect in consequence that it will be necessarily just or fair) In most cases, we
lack a sufficiently strong interpretative schema to make sense of such tautologies. Prior
knowledge not only interprets facts and concepts but also calls up interactive procedures or
routines. The latter have been given a wide range of labels: scripts, scenarios, frames and routines.
Knowledge of such procedures derives from both non-verbal and verbal kind of experience and
regulates our behaviors in pre-generic settings and in generic ones such as “visiting the doctor” or
“going to a restaurant! Procedures have to be unlearnt and relevant in unaccustomed cultural
situations where different schemata may be the norm. a common instance is when visitors to Italy
are often surprised at the number of questions Italian diners ask about the food. Procedures may
derive from both previous experience and prior texts and contribute to the formation of formal
schemata – background knowledge of the rhetorical structure of different types of texts. Each
experience we have of a class of events changes our perceptions of that class. While Becker may
be right in the way that in which a particular discourse may evoke other discourses, it is also the
case that a particular discourse may invoke more abstract properties such as informational
arrangements and rhetorical structure and more general features of textually. It seems that both
content and formal schemata can contribute to a recognition of genres and so guide the
production of exemplars. It is clear that the ways in which the two types of schema- with or
without the intervention of interpersonal schemata or procedures- interact is at present
incompletely understood. The available research supports the common sense expectancies that
when content and form are familiar the texts will be relatively accessible, whereas when neither
content nor form is familiar the text will be relatively inaccessible. Nystrand argues that we are
already prepared for certain genres but not for others before we open a newspaper or the box
containing some machine we have just bought. He says that even before I open my mail I know
something about it. Once the envelope is open, the trail of clues which proceeds the text
continues. This process of elimination is a kind of “wedge” in which the first and broadest stage is
to identify genre, the second to identify the topic of the communication and the third is to
recognize the sender´s stance on that topic. Nystrand in this wat usefully identifies procedural
routines that operates within the pre- or early textual context and gives genre a watershed role in
controlling the reader´s expectations. The role of genres at earlier educational and
developmental stages: there would seem to be some evidence that children acquire some genre
skills quite early because “children are able to internalize models of language and of genres which
have been provided through repeated conversational interactions” some of these early genres in
my culture are bedtime stories, nursery rhymes and the role-play of the doctors and nurses type.
Painter goes on to relate the acquisition of spoken genres to that of written ones: it is necessary
for teachers to have a clearly formulated idea as to what kind of writing is being worked towards
at a particular point in their programs. If they have not had any occasion to internalize a model of
such a text type, whether spoken or written, how can they be expected to construct it? The
concerns expressed by Painter have been shared by many others who have seen the teaching of
writing to be over—dominated by teacher emphasis on “creativity” or “originality” and under-
concerned with genres other than narrative. I have attempted to show how prior knowledge can
give rise to the identification and control of genres. I have alluded to the important role of
schemata in discoursal processing and production, but I have also observed that schemata alone
reflect microcosmic cognitive world dangerously adrift from communicative purpose and
discoursal context. We may come to see genres as instruments of rhetorical action can have
generative power; they not only provide maps of new territories but also provide the means for
their exploration.

Part III – Research-process genres

The research article or paper (RA) is taken to be a written text usually limited to a few thousand
words, that reports on some investigation carried out by its author or authors. The RA will usually
relate the findings within it to those of others, may also examine issues of theory and/or
methodology. The fact that the research article usually appears within the covers of a particular
journal means, of course that it is not an independent sui generis text but rather an end product
that has been specifically shaped and negotiated in the author´s efforts to obtain acceptance.