A Genre-Centered Discourse Analysis And Its Implications For Language Teaching

Genre analysis is an important orientation of discourse analysis and is studied extensively under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). During the past decade, functional linguists and discourse analysts accomplish genre analysis by decoding the generic structures of different text types. Recently, the study of genre analysis has been shifting to the pedagogic orientation and application. Genre analysis in the pedagogical context provides new perspective to language teaching, because a good grasp of genres will help students achieve success in their study.Drawing on the theoretical framework of Hasan's Generic Structure Potential, this thesis is to investigate the concept of the genre analysis of narrative and business letter text types and to examine the contextual conditions in the two text types within a systemic functional approach. Based on the study of the generic structure of the two specific genres, this thesis aims at uncovering some implications for the teaching of narrative and business letter text types in a multi-leveled manner.From our detailed analysis of the narrative and business letter text types, we find out that the obligatory stages help determine a text's generic membership and nature. The complication part of a narrative and the middle part of business letter plays an important role in relating a text to a certain genre, or a certain sub-genre in a natural manner. Besides, we figure out that in terms of language teaching, it is possible to bring in a fair amount of creativity by adjusting communicative purposes, the nature of participation in a particular communicative setting, the relationship between the participants, and above all, by bringing in variability by using generic strategies to achieve the same communicative purposes.