A Text and Its Commentaries: Toward a Reception History of "Genre in Three Traditions" (Hyon, 1996)1

John M. Swales

University of Michigan (USA)

More than a decade ago, Paul, Charney and Kendall (2001) made a case for giving more attention in rhetorical and discoursal studies of scholarly texts to what happens to those texts after they have appeared. They argue:

To move beyond the moment, we need to find ways to gauge the effects of normal scientific texts on readers when they are first published, watch acceptance and rejection over time, and associate those effects reliably with rhetorical strategies in the texts. (2001, p. 374)

They claim that only in this way can we establish that writing, as well as methodology or findings, may play some part in its text's subsequent reception, whether that be apparent indifference, noisy controversy, or well-cited approval and adaptation. In consequence, we might imagine that a smooth, well-structured introduction would help garner citations, while another on a similar topic that is disjointed and hard-to-follow would be less successful. In fact, literary scholars had already been pointing out that texts may have both unexpected as well as expected uptakes; for example, Merleau-Ponty (1974) observed that the audiences at which writers aim are not pre-established, but are instead elicited by reactions to their written products. And here is Kermode (1985):

Since we have no experience of a venerable text that ensures its own perpetuity, we may reasonably say that the medium in which it survives is commentary. All commentary on such texts varies from one generation to the next because it meets different needs. (p. 36)

Of course, certain well-known sayings, proverbs, lines of poetry, and key religious texts perpetuate themselves in oral telling and retellings, but for academic texts, we all depend on commentary, whether unsolicited or whether mediated by lists of required readings, or by reviews, or by recommendations from colleagues or mentors.

As it happens, in June 2012, Carleton University in Ottawa hosted a major conference entitled "Genre 2012: Rethinking genre 20 years later," a follow-up to a smaller gathering held in 1992 at the same venue and with a similar theme (Freedman & Medway, 1994). Not very long after the 1992 Carleton conference, Hyon published an article in TESOL Quarterly entitled "Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL" (1996), that has become quite widely cited, accumulating over 300 hits on Google Scholar and over 50 citations in the Web of Science. At the 2012 event, many of the leading figures in the development of studies of non-literary genres were present, including Martin for Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Bhatia, Hyland and Johns for English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and Bazerman, Devitt and Miller for New Rhetoric Studies. So the purpose of this essay is to try and trace who has been citing the 1996 paper, and when and where, and then perhaps to attempt an answer to the question of why.

The 1996 Paper and Some Facts about its Origination

The published abstract will serve as an aide-memoire and summary of the paper (my emphases added):

Within the last two decades, a number of researchers have been interested in genre as a tool for developing L1 and L2 writing instruction. Both genre and genre-based pedagogy, however, have been conceived of in distinct ways by researchers in different scholarly traditions and in different parts of the world, making the genre literature a complicated body of literature to understand. The purpose of this article is to provide a map of current genre theories and teaching applications in three research areas where genre scholarship has taken significantly different paths: a) English for Specific Purposes (ESP), North American New Rhetoric Studies, and c) Australian systemic functional linguistics. The article compares definitions and analyses of genres within these three traditions and examines their contexts, goals and instructional frameworks for genre-based pedagogy. The investigation reveals that ESP and Australian genre research provides ESL instructors with insights into the linguistic features of written texts as well as useful guidelines for presenting these features in classrooms. New Rhetoric scholarship, on the other hand, offers language teachers fuller perspectives on the institutional contexts around academic and professional genres and the functions genres serve within those settings. (Hyon, 1996, p. 693)

This then was the paper, which was loosely based on the first part of Hyon's PhD dissertation, for which I was the advisor, the second half being an EAP classroom experiment testing out a genre-based approach to academic reading. Some time in the early 1990s, we managed to get funding (the details now escape me) for Hyon to spend several months at the University of Sydney so that she could familiarize herself with the Australian approach to genre and genre-based pedagogy. Her original submission to TESOL Quarterly then was essentially a comparison between the ESP and SFL approaches, but one of the anonymous reviewers recommended that Hyon not go with a geographical binary, but rather with a three-part...