Pattern and particularity in a pedagogical genre: The case of an individual teacher

The pedagogical focus of many genre studies in the field of applied linguistics has produced a wealth of materials designed to raise students’ awareness of the purposes, rhetorical structures, linguistic features, and contexts associated with particular educational genres. The desire to pin down the key characteristics of these genres has also resulted in a conceptualization of genres as rather more stable and constraining/normative than is the case in other disciplines such as literary studies and linguistic anthropology. In this chapter, we report on a rhetorical genre-based analysis of a spoken classroom event in the discipline of architecture - an event that was identified in the current study as both recurrent and patterned. As in many genre studies in the field of applied linguistics, we sought to characterize of the genre for teaching and learning purposes. Less usual was the case study approach adopted here, focusing on one teacher and his use of this classroom genre. A case study approach allowed us to explore the pattern and variability in the teacher’s improvisational pedagogical style. More generally, we want to argue that a study of particularity (in this case of one teacher’s use of a classroom genre) has the potential to contribute to a broader understanding of genre and generic boundaries. The chapter concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of individual variation as well as underlining the need for a concept of genre in applied linguistics that allows a space to consider the tension between stability and creativity in language use