Multimodal Genre Systems in EAP | Writing Pedagogy: Reflecting on a Needs Analysis ~~

Multimodal Genre Systems in EAP Writing Pedagogy: Reflecting on a Needs Analysis DANIELLA MOLLE University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, Wisconsin, United States PAUL PRIOR University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois, United States This article reports on a genre-based needs analysis for a graduate course in English for academic purposes (EAP) at a large public U.S university In particular, it describes the theoretical reconceptualizations of genre analysis that the data provoked Using ethnographic methods, an investigation of academic genres in several classrooms in three academic disciplines (civil and environmental engineering, architecture, and music) found three complexities that challenged the original premises of the needs analysis: (a) that academic genres existed in genre sets and systems that involved process and pedagogical genres as well as genres of disciplinary or academic presentation; (b) that genres were routinely multimodal in process and form; and (c) that the discursive character of particular texts was routinely quite hybrid This article discusses and illustrates each of these findings and argues for understanding them as dimensions of multimodal genre systems s Canagarajah (2006) points out, scholars in the field of TESOL have stopped looking for conclusive answers and have accepted that, both as researchers and as practitioners, we need to abandon “the comfort of solutions” (emphasis in the original, p 30) and embrace the messy practice of “continued questioning and searching” (p 13) As we strive to deepen our understanding of the challenges we face, such questioning and searching is our only feasible research goal This article emerges out of that mangle of practice, as Pickering (1995) describes such processes: It began as a needs analysis aimed at identifying different genres for an English for academic purposes (EAP) course and ended by destabilizing our initial conceptualization of genres and how they operate In the teaching of writing to speakers of other languages in general, A TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 4, December 2008 541 and in EAP in particular, the efforts of researchers and instructors to find answers to pressing questions about the needs of students has often turned to genre analysis (Swales, 1990) EAP researchers have pursued detailed analyses of the types of academic texts that students produce in diverse disciplines (e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Braine, 1995; Coe, 2002; Hyland, 2004; Swales, 1990, 2004), the skills that such texts require of students (e.g., Belcher, 1995; Johns, 1997; Leki & Carson, 1997), and the ways in which genres function in specific contexts (e.g., Casanave, 2002; Prior, 1995, 1998) Genre analysis has considerably increased our understanding of the complexity of genres and their linguistic and social realization It has also offered valuable perspectives on possible approaches to teaching genre to diverse populations of students and shed light on some of the most urgent needs of students in particular contexts At the same time, EAP research has illustrated that the term needs can be conceptualized very differently: ranging from form–function correlations (Bhatia, 1993) to becoming aware of one’s rights as a student (Benesch, 2001) EAP research has suggested, furthermore, that no needs analysis can be final or exhaustive, and that “needs assessment itself [is] in need of continual reassessment” (Belcher, 2006, p 135) Needs analysis has ideological roots, and EAP approaches to it are grounded in (often strong) expectations about the kinds of generic discourse, values, and practices that the students will encounter This article discusses the conceptualization and execution of a genrebased needs analysis for an EAP course for international graduate students at a large Midwestern U.S university More specifically, the article reports on the ways in which some results of the needs analysis forced us to consider genres from more deeply processual, semiotic, and dialogic perspectives The narrative of our journey is organized as follows We first discuss the initial goals of the research and describe in general terms the nature of the theoretical reconceptualizations that the data provoked Second, we briefly describe the setting and methods of the needs analysis Third, we examine each of the three intriguing findings (or anomalies) that destabilized the initial theoretical framework We conclude by discussing possible pedagogical implications INITIAL GOALS AND SUBSEQUENT RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE RESEARCH Many scholars and practitioners involved with academic writing have concluded that genre-oriented instruction is one key to preparing students for the writing that they may be expected to produce during their academic careers (e.g., Bazerman, 2004; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; 542 TESOL QUARTERLY Bhatia, 1993; Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999; Hyland, 2004; Johns, 2002; Paltridge, 2001; Russell, 1997; Swales, 1990, 2004; Swales & Feak, 2004).1 Such a focus on genre, however, presents EAP instructors and researchers with three immediate challenges: Which genres should be taught in the EAP classroom? What kinds of features will best characterize these genres? And how are genres best taught or learned? Underneath these challenges lies a more fundamental set of questions about what genres are; what work they do; and how they are learned, used, and transformed EAP researchers have generally attempted to address at least the first two questions by conducting some form of needs analysis It was in view of this broad consensus and in response to local concerns about the relevance and theoretical grounding of an EAP writing curriculum at a major U.S university that one of us (Molle) decided to pursue a needs analysis in her role as an instructor of an EAP course for international graduate students at this university and asked the second author (Prior) to direct this study for a master’s thesis The research sought to investigate students’ needs through a contextualized analysis of the types of genres that students were asked to produce during two semesters in a sample of disciplines The research design used ethnographic methods: interviewing students and instructors, collecting course documents and student texts, and observing some classes We anticipated that the end product of the study would be a list of proposed changes (e.g., different genres, different ways of handling process) to the existing genre-based curriculum of the EAP writing course that would reflect the study’s findings as well as recent developments in EAP research As the analysis proceeded, however, it became increasingly apparent that the theoretical approach that had prompted the design did not match up well with the data collected The analysis was pointing toward different understandings from what typical genre theory and needs analysis would anticipate in three respects First, needs analysis has typically aimed to uncover clearly identifiable genres (or tasks) We soon concluded, however, that analysis of genre as an isolated phenomenon Considerable diversity exists in genre theories A common classification (Hyland, 2004; Hyon, 1996) identifies three schools, systemic functional linguistics (SFL), English for specific purposes, and new rhetoric, though others (e.g., Johns, 2003) suggest researchers and practitioners routinely blend insights from these schools Nevertheless, key differences are noticeable, for example, in their definitions of genre: new rhetorical approaches take up an open set of whole genres in specific contexts (e.g., a lab report in a biology classroom), whereas SFL defines genres as a finite set of linguistic processes (e.g., recount, narrative, account) that typically combine in whole texts (with recount appearing in lab reports, letters, novels, news reports, etc.) The approach we take, influenced by the intersection of phenomenological sociology with Bakhtinian views of genre as forms of situated practice (Hanks, 1996; Bazerman & Prior, 2005), positions us closest to new rhetoric and farthest from SFL MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 543 would be incomplete and misleading and that it could not account for the ways we saw genres functioning in these contexts What we found was a complex web of relationships among different genres, within which some texts had ambiguous status as genres and some seemed primarily oriented to goals other than communication Second, genre-based needs analysis has typically aimed at identifying a set of textual features that could describe particular genres in particular contexts, and genre analysis, from Swales (1990) to Hyland (2004), has primarily focused on the language of texts Yet, we found that multiple modes or media coexisted not only at every level of the texts (from sections to phrases) but also throughout the writing process, and these modes of representation coconstructed the meaning of the text Third, although genres (such as scientific reports) are seen as constituted by sections with different patterns of language use (e.g., the way the textual–rhetorical patterns of an introduction differ from those of a methods section), genre analysis typically assumes a basic unity in the discourse, voice, or style of each genre In analyzing student work, however, we began to see a more heterogeneous blend of discourses appearing (and being accepted) in those texts These anomalies, as we have called them, about the nature of genre in the disciplines certainly challenged the main premises of the particular EAP curriculum that the research had aimed at revising However, they also challenged the initial formulation of the research itself, raising intriguing questions about how to conceive of genres, needs analysis, and genre-based teaching in light of these observations SETTING AND METHODOLOGY As already mentioned, the needs analysis was undertaken to reexamine the basis for an EAP writing course for international graduate students at a major public university in the United States The course involves two 2-hour class sessions per week for a semester (15 weeks); its multiple sections are taught primarily by masters-level graduate teaching assistants Almost all sections of the course enroll students from across the campus (i.e., not from specific degree programs) We planned to collect data from students and instructors in four disciplines The number of disciplines selected for the study could not be larger for practical reasons (balancing resources to the goal of achieving some depth of analysis) We believed, however, that a sampling of several different disciplines should assist us in finding some common academic ground (if such ground existed) and also allow us to partially test the fit of the existing genres taught in the EAP course to those in some locally impor544 TESOL QUARTERLY tant disciplines Four departments at the university were selected: Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Music, and Psychology These disciplines were chosen on the basis of two criteria: (a) the number of students in the discipline who attended the EAP course in question during the five semesters between spring 2002 and fall 2004 and (b) the range of disciplines selected for the study.2 Unfortunately, participation by students and faculty in psychology proved too limited to support in-depth analysis, though the small amount of data collected was consistent with findings from the other fields The study spanned two semesters and investigated the writing conventions in three disciplines through genre analysis of student texts; in-depth interviews with faculty and several international students; analysis of course materials such as syllabi, handouts, and evaluation sheets; and class observations Course documents and student texts were collected from the student participants as well as the instructor participants in the study All the writing assignments that the primary student participants completed for the EAP course and for their disciplinary courses in the period of data collection (two semesters) were obtained, along with course documents from the students’ disciplinary courses In those cases in which no student participants were enrolled in classes to which we had access through instructors, we obtained course documents and (with student consent) student texts from the instructors We sought and obtained permission to analyze the texts from their authors The student authors (the great majority of whom were international students) of the texts we collected from instructors were not interviewed for this study and are thus not designated as primary student participants The assignments collected varied across disciplines and across different courses in the same discipline; they included reaction papers, book reports, posters, and term papers In most cases, we were able to obtain student texts written in response to these assignments with instructor comments When we could not obtain students’ written texts with instructor comments, the instructor’s assessment of the student texts was discussed during the in-depth interview with the primary student participants With one exception, all primary student participants had taken or CEE, architecture, and music were chosen not only because they were among the six disciplines that contributed for five semesters the highest number of students to the EAP course studied but also because they contributed students each semester We were also looking for departments in different colleges as well as for disciplines that represented different types of fields (professional vs more conventionally academic) We were hoping that this would expose us to a greater variability of genres and conventions This first consideration eliminated disciplines like electrical engineering (which was in the same college as CEE) The second consideration led to the choice of psychology as the fourth discipline to be included in the study: unlike the other three, it is a more academic than professional discipline MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 545 were taking the EAP writing course when data collection began These students were international graduate students from around the world, most of whom were enrolled in doctoral programs at the university All primary student participants were interviewed The interviews focused on the students’ experience of writing in the disciplines and on their own assessment of their needs in relation to writing The primary instructors who participated in the study were members of the faculty in the students’ disciplines and all identified as native English speakers from the United States All primary instructor participants were interviewed The interviews focused on the assignments the instructors gave their students, the rationale behind the assignments, and the instructors’ criteria for a successful text Course observation was successfully negotiated with some of the instructors As Table indicates, four courses were observed, two in architecture, one in CEE, and one in music The CEE course was observed only once because, according to the instructor, this was the only time the writing assignment for the course (a term paper) was described The courses in architecture and music were observed every time the students gave presentations related to their written texts or the class discussed writing assignments, and the number of observations varied considerably (from two sessions to all class meetings of a course) Analysis of the data was interpretive and focused on developing a thick, integrated account of the writing done in the disciplinary courses by drawing on the various sources of data (rather than through data reduction) The genre analysis examined the organization, style, and purpose of each assignment (as a whole) and its components (sections and paragraphs), as well as any connections between the writing assignments, other course documents (such as syllabi and model samples), classroom observations, and oral and written instructor comments The TABLE Overall Description of the Data Collected for the Study per Department Department Primary instructor participants Student participants primary/total Course assignments Student texts Courses studied*/ observed Architecture CEE Music Total 3 2/3 2/7 2/10 6/20 10 21 15 11 11 37 3/2 4/1 10/1 17/4 * The numbers in this column correspond to the number of courses from which written assignments and course documents were collected For some courses, the assignments and documents were obtained solely through the primary student participants in the current study (when we had no access to the instructors), for some courses solely through the instructor participants (when no primary student participants were enrolled in the course), and for some courses through both 546 TESOL QUARTERLY analysis was grounded in theories of genre as situated practices (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Devitt, 2004; Prior, 1998) Data were selected for presentation in this article to include a range of courses and participants but also to display well the types of phenomena that led us to make our central arguments As Table indicates, the needs analysis was modest in scope: disciplines, primary instructors, primary students (and 14 other student participants), 21 assignments, 37 student texts, and courses observed (with some data on 13 other courses) Nevertheless, the depth and range of the data, combined with the local relevance of these departments, permitted a critical analysis of how well the academic tasks these graduate students were assigned in their courses fit with the existing EAP curriculum and ultimately also of how well the initial theoretical framework fit with the data In short, needs analysis cannot present a total picture of “what students need,” but these data did test the adequacy of curricular approaches and theoretical frameworks Although the research began with questions about the relevance of the current genres to the curriculum covered, it also began with the assumption that a careful examination of genres would point toward a revised set of genres and perhaps some additional writing practices As we have already noted, the findings quickly led us to more basic questions about that way of implementing genre theory We turn next to the results of the research as we present and analyze the three dimensions of genres that the data analysis pushed us to consider: the relationships among genres, the multimodality of genres, and the hybrid discourse of particular genres GENRE SYSTEMS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES: RESULTS OF THE NEEDS ANALYSIS From Genres to Genre Systems As we analyzed genres in courses across these three disciplines, we soon came to see that texts that represented particular genres were located in chains of texts that included other genres and that some texts were generically ambiguous or complex in interesting ways Over the last 15 years, in different terms and with somewhat different emphases, but with increasing clarity, genre analysts have been moving from a focus on genres as isolated phenomena to a recognition of how specific types of texts are constituted by systems of genres Genres have been described in terms of chains (Fairclough, 2004; Räisänen, 1999; Swales, 2004), colonies (Bhatia, 2002), repertoires (Devitt, 2004; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994), sets (Devitt, 1991), systems (Bazerman, 1994, 2004), and ecologies (Spinuzzi, MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 547 2004) Theorists have also begun to highlight ways that genre theory has privileged public texts and taken up a perspective that treats the primary functions of genres as communicative Swales (1996, 2004), for example, identified the category of occluded genres, or genres that are not typically publicly shared In addition, Spinuzzi has argued that genres should be understood as mediational means or as collective tools that control practices “from the outside” (p 114) Situated genre analyses in specific sites (e.g., Bazerman, 1999; Berkenkotter, 2001; Prior, 1998) have also depicted ways that literate activity involves multimodal chains of genres (e.g., from planning talk to a written text that may then be reviewed orally and in writing), many of which are relatively occluded and foreground mediation of activity (e.g., a checklist that functions for the user as a mnemonic device and prompts a sequence of actions) The ways in which the genres analyzed in the current study interacted differed among and within disciplines, but evidence of such interaction was clearly visible in most of the content courses included in the study In a class on gender and race in architecture, for example, students’ book reviews were shaped by the instructions, samples, and evaluation sheets handed out by the instructor The written book reviews were also accompanied by 10-minute oral presentations In a seminar on music, the research papers that students composed were based on their earlier oral presentations and were shaped by the instructor’s guidelines for the paper and the musical analyses the instructor had modeled throughout the semester In a mechanics course in CEE, the students’ term papers grew out of their project proposals and progress reports The analysis of genres in these disciplines revealed strong intertextual relationships among representatives of the same type of genre (e.g., samples of book reviews composed during past semesters and assigned book reviews), among texts that represented different genres but shared a medium (e.g., assignment descriptions, project proposals, and research papers), and among texts in different media (e.g., oral presentations and research papers) It also identified texts that seemed designed to support learning and other activities and that were harder to categorize in usual genre terms We turn now to an example of how genre systems appeared in the work of a CEE course The assignment, or series of assignments, that we have chosen to illustrate the intertextual nature of genre in the disciplines comes from a graduate course in CEE related to advanced topics in the science and technology of materials used in civil engineering construction We should note that this assignment may not be representative; the instructor indicated in an interview that it was the first time he had used it Nevertheless, it demonstrates a pattern of relating genres that we saw across disciplines in content courses in which the instructors were genuinely concerned about the quality of their students’ writing and wanted 548 TESOL QUARTERLY to help them improve it through a structured and linked sequence of activities The professor of the advanced materials course in CEE taught two related courses Instead of assigning the same type of paper in both courses, he decided that he would use one of the courses to give students the kind of guidance in writing up research that he felt he had needed but had not received when he was a graduate student Consequently, he developed what he called a research exercise for that course His main purpose was to teach his students how to approach research critically and so be better able to meet the expectations of experts in CEE In particular, he wanted to show students how each new piece of research is connected to research done in the past and points to research that may be done in the future The tasks were carefully staged and structured, so that they built on each other and gradually became more and more complex The research exercise consisted of four different tasks The first task had an open format, the second one was a critical review, the third was argumentative, and the fourth was argumentative and contained a summary Each task was approximately 1,000 words in length At one level, this exercise fits with various observations of school genres (see, e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Dias et al., 1999), that is, of genres designed for learning and/or evaluation However, what we want to emphasize is the staged design of the tasks and how complexly related they are to one another and to the disciplinary–professional practices they indexed Task asked students to (a) choose a paper on a particular topic and explain why they had chosen that topic and (b) select an article related to that topic and describe how they located it The task provided a way for the instructor to ensure that students could make use of the library resources The instructor also put special emphasis on the citation for the paper The structure of the first part of Task resembles a part of the Introduction section in an empirical research paper (establishing a research territory, to use the terms in Swales & Feak, 2004) As we have already mentioned, this resemblance was the result of a deliberate choice on the instructor’s part to prepare students for the critical thinking they need to when they write research papers The second part of the assignment consisted of a list of the steps that students took in finding a journal article As a whole, this task rehearsed both pedagogical functions (student learning) and the backgrounded processes of academic work (critical thinking, library searching) Task asked students to write a critical review of the article they had selected They had specific instructions on what to include in their critique: After they summarized the content of each section of the paper— background, experimental tests (if any), modeling (if any), findings and conclusions—they had to identify at least one strength and one weakness of MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 549 the article and support their opinion Then they were asked to “identify one significant study, test series, model, etc that is not currently in the paper but that would make the paper stronger or more convincing than it currently is.” The following paragraph illustrates how Ji-Hyun,3 a graduate student in CEE from Korea, described the strengths of the article she was reviewing: The use of C3S eliminated any effects of ettringite formation on expansion Hence, results could be analyzed focusing on the role of gypsum formation Since two kinds of C3S—monoclinic crystal with impurities (MgO, Al2O3, Fe2O3 and alkalis) and triclinic crystals without impurities—were used and both specimens showed same trend for expansion in sulfate solution, it reduced the possibility that expansion is caused by other chemicals (minor substances in cement such as MgO, Al2O3, Fe2O3 and alkalis) The use of two kinds of sulfate solution—Na2SO4 and (NH4)2SO4—can be understood in same manner As a result, the experiment was composed well to generalize the results The literature review part was helpful to overview the contradicting and supporting theories about gypsum formation Due to this review session, experiment results can be judged objectively Task pushed students one step further in their analysis of the journal article and showed them two fundamental features of research work: that it builds on past studies in a particular area and that it offers a unique contribution In this task, students were first asked to provide full citations for “three previous papers [ .] which report findings that lead (either sequentially or in parallel) to the work reported in the paper.” Then they were asked to “document the procedure used to locate and identify the selected background papers,” “identify or map out links in technical ideas/developments between the background papers and the current paper,” and then “briefly describe how [the paper] provides technical contributions/innovations over the selected background papers.” The first three parts of the task (provide citations, document procedures, identify or map out topical links) involve backgrounded research processes, and the last one (describe contributions/innovations) is a typical feature of literature reviews Task asked students to engage with a partner’s work In a research interview, the instructor indicated that his intentions were twofold: to encourage students to their best on the tasks by telling them that a classmate was also going to look at their writing and to give students an opportunity to engage in another research area besides their own that was related to the content of the class Task asked students to summarize their partner’s thoughts and conclusions in Tasks 1–3 and then, on 550 All student names are pseudonyms TESOL QUARTERLY some genres (e.g., summary, abstract, or literature review) are deemed important to consider because they serve as components of larger genres (e.g., research papers and dissertations) Swales and Feak highlight the diverse genres (occluded and foregrounded) that come together in academic contexts and describe them as forming a genre network They usefully note chains of genres in background activity like the search for academic positions Nevertheless, they go on to treat genres such as the conference abstract and the literature review in separate chapters and only lightly link together forms of academic communication (e.g., requests and reminders) Such approaches, rich as they are in many respects, may reinforce the notion that genres can be studied on their own Representing a loose collection of genres in a network does not signal the complex web of relationships among genres that we found in our analysis A theoretical framework that seems to account better for our experience of genres in the disciplines is one that links the notions of activity systems to genre sets and genre systems (Bazerman, 1994, 2004; Devitt, 1991).4 In this framework, genre sets are “collections of types of texts someone in a particular role is likely to produce,” while genre systems consist of “the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way, plus the patterned relations in the production, flow, and the use of these documents” (Bazerman, 2004, p 318) In giving examples of these notions in relation to classrooms, Bazerman clearly includes informal and occluded as well as formal genres and multiple media as well as written texts (e.g., students’ notes on lectures, rough drafts, oral questions in class, e-mail questions to the instructor; maps and clay models; instructor’s notes for lectures, replies to student questions and comments in class or online, syllabi and assignment sheets, class lectures, and hallway discussions) Genre systems are in turn shaped by, and give shape to, activity systems—durable cultural-historical configurations of tools, people, and sociomaterial environments aimed at achieving certain object(ive)s (Bazerman & Prior, 2005; Berkenkotter, 2001; Russell, 1997) A theoretical framework that views individual genres as constituents of a system should be of pedagogical significance As Bazerman (2004) points 552 Devitt (1991) defined genre sets in terms of the genres of a particular category of actor in an institutional context Analyzing tax accountants, she noted that “together with oral genres and tax returns, these kinds of texts form the accountant’s genre system, a set of genres interacting to accomplish the work of the tax department” (p 340) Devitt (2004) does not differentiate between genre sets and genre systems (and indicates that she prefers sets to systems because she is concerned that the latter term might suggest a fixity and order beyond what is typical) She also takes up genre repertoire to point to the somewhat broader range of possible genres in a sphere of activity Bazerman (1994), on the other hand, proposed understanding genre systems more broadly as the whole range of genres that all participants in a context might produce (perhaps in particular sequences) In our discussion, we are roughly following Bazerman’s use of set and system TESOL QUARTERLY out, such a framework may help instructors to “identify all the forms of writing a student must engage in to study, to communicate with the teacher and classmates, and to submit for dialogue and evaluation” and thus help “define the competences, challenges, and opportunities for learning” present in a particular content course (p 318) The value of this theoretical framework seems evident in the context of the advanced materials course in CEE The nature of the assignment and the relationships among its parts were shaped by the system of activity in which the professor and the students were engaged In this case, the system of activity was driven by a focus on teaching and learning as well as on the backgrounded professional practices of engineers; it was a system of activity whose primary motive was to help the students learn to think and act like engineers The public genres of engineering may have played only a secondary role in these four tasks, but the activity systems of engineering influenced all the aspects of the texts that the students were asked to produce: their form, content, process, and communicative purpose It seems crucial, then, to prepare students for the possibility that the different genres they may be asked to produce in their content courses can be connected to each other and that both this connection and the genres themselves can be influenced by diverse purposes Multimodality of Genre in Text and Process Scholars in the field of EAP have long recognized that EAP instructors can only have limited understanding of the writing that students compose for their content courses and have thus advocated different forms of collaboration between EAP instructors and instructors in the disciplines (e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Dudley-Evans, 2001; Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Johns, 1997; Starfield, 2001) Discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of EAP instructors’ interpretation of writing in the disciplines have tended to be general, however The specific features of texts in the disciplines, other than specialized knowledge and lexis, that limit the access of nonexperts are rarely detailed Analysis of student writing in this study suggests that one key reason for the inaccessibility of disciplinary texts may be their particular forms of multimodality The papers we studied could not be neatly divided into nonverbal sections (such as a series of equations, plots, or sketches) and verbal sections (i.e., sections consisting exclusively of linguistic elements) The visual elements in the student texts we collected occurred within the verbal text and were integral to the texts, even down to the level of phrases in sentences The text in Figure is a case in point, It comes from a paper composed by Peter, a master’s student in music from MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 553 FIGURE Paragraph From Peter’s Vector Analysis Taiwan, for a course on musical form analysis Figure displays several representational modes mixed with the linguistic: the visual representation of the musical staff marked as “Graph 2,” the use of musical notation Eb6 and A#2, and most interestingly, the insertion of musical notes in the place of the head for a noun phrase (after “notated as”) Figure is an excerpt from a research paper that Monica, a doctoral student in CEE from Brazil, wrote for a course in mechanics Once again, the figure contains a linguistically notated graphic and mathematical notations (complete with Greek letters) in the graph and in the text 554 TESOL QUARTERLY FIGURE Excerpt From Monica’s Methods Section 3.2 Membrane Spherical Shell’s Displacements Fig (Beluzzi [1958], p 276, 277, 385) Considering a meridian element ab = R1d␸, inclined by an angle␸, after the displacement this element becomes a1b1 (Fig 3) The components v and w are the displacements components of point a according to the meridian’s tangent and the meridian’s normal Another key finding of the data analysis was that the multimodal nature of some tasks affected the criteria that instructors in the disciplines used to evaluate the linguistic sections of texts One of the prime examples of this type of interaction between the verbal-linguistic and the visual comes from architecture.5 Figure presents an exhibit board about a Latina architect that constituted the final assignment in a course on gender and race in architecture As even a cursory glance at Figure demonstrates, the exhibit board combines the visual and the verbal What is less obvious, however, is that the verbal and the visual are motivated and assessed in terms of common cross-modal criteria (cf Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) The main criteria for good visuals in the architecture classes included in this study were that they be attractive, that See Swales, Barks, Ostermann, and Simpson (2001) and Dias et al (1999) for other analyses of architectural genres and practices MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 555 FIGURE Exhibit Board From Architecture they be arranged in a visually appealing manner, that what they represent be clear, that they be clearly labeled, and that they tie in well with the text that surrounds them Many of these generic values (e.g., the emphasis on appeal and clarity) were criteria that the written text was also expected to meet The professors we interviewed in architecture insisted on the “attractiveness” of text, by which they meant that there should be no typographical errors, that the sentences should be powerful and memorable, and that the content should grab the reader’s attention (in the context of the exhibit board this was accomplished, in part, by asking the students’ to include “juicy quotes” by the architect they had interviewed) They put great emphasis on “simple declarative sentences” and “short readable paragraphs,” or, in other words, on clarity Figure also illustrates the focus on linguistic-visual design (e.g., words in red borders; red and white-on-red [reversed] sans serif, sometimes shadowed typefaces; complex backgrounds, and varied text vectors) Lemke (1998) analyzed the topological and typological dimensions of scientific texts, arguing that such texts represent multimedia genres, that such genres have long been a feature of writing in the sciences, and that this mix of modalities plays a crucial role in the construction of meaning 556 TESOL QUARTERLY Our analysis corroborates Lemke’s claims and points to multimedia genres and discourse beyond science Building on the example in the last section, we propose extending attention from multimedia genres to multimodal genre systems, where the mix of media and modes appear not only in specific texts (as in the excerpts from Peter’s and Monica’s papers), but also in their use (e.g., a text may be written to be read aloud) and in the chains of semiotic encounters (Agha, 2007) that make up the whole system (e.g., where a sequence of genres that involve talk, gesture, and synchronous interaction and that focus on inquiry, response, and presentation mix with genres organized around inscriptions—visual representations of language, images, icons, diagrams, and so forth) More to the point, this view argues that once genres are understood as always material and embodied, as always constituted through relations of production, reception, distribution, and representation, then talking, reading, writing, listening, drawing, all become multimedia, multichannel semiotic processes In that sense, multimodal genre systems involve sets of differently configured multimedia genres linked together in locally situated ways In addition, Lemke (1998) pointed out that the different media in an academic text may co-construct not only its meaning but also its reception by the audience (as was the case with the exhibit board in Figure 3) This factor may contribute to the variability of genre in the academy that has already been documented (e.g., Prior, 1998) As was mentioned at the beginning of this article, researchers in the field of EAP have pointed out that one way in which EAP instructors may acknowledge this variability and prepare their students for it is by helping the students become ethnographers of genre and investigate audience expectations in the context of specific assignments for particular content courses (Johns, 1997) A recognition of multimodal genre systems raises the stakes here The multimodal nature of genre suggests that an exclusive emphasis on the linguistic representation of ideas in the EAP classrooms may not prepare students well for writing in their classes or in their disciplines/ professions Collaboration between EAP instructors and instructors in the disciplines then becomes essential (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Johns, 1998) to ensuring that careful attention is given to the full range of multimedia genres and practices Without such collaboration, EAP instructors may fail to understand not only the undecipherable semiotics of their students’ texts but also the linguistic sections that have long been considered their area of expertise It may also be the case that EAP instructors taking this perspective can help disciplinary instructors and students by calling attention to the multimodal character of the genres and to the full chains of discourse and activity (because many of these elements may remain tacit to the disciplinary participants) MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 557 Discursive Hybridity In the United Kingdom in recent years, researchers have suggested moving away from analyzing writing in traditional academic disciplines (Lea & Street, 1998, 2006) as well as from conceptualizing academic discourse as monologic6 (Lillis, 2003; see also Ivanicˇ, 1998) However, as Lillis acknowledges, this shift has not yet taken place in discussions of teaching practice The term academic writing, which seems to imply a unity and consistency to academic discourse, is still widely used in EAP genre theory discourse and in EAP research in general One of the most popular handbooks for teachers of EAP at the college level (Swales & Feak, 2004), for instance, gives international graduate students the following advice on style: Academic writers need to be sure that their communications are written in the appropriate style The style of a particular piece must not only be consistent but must also be appropriate both for the message being conveyed and for the audience (p 17) Our needs analysis anticipated some type of discourse unity within a particular genre, a particular paper, or at least the sections of a genre (e.g., a summary or a narrative) It also anticipated that representatives of a named genre (e.g., research papers or methods sections of research papers) in different disciplines would display certain roughly shared discourse features What we found, however, was that the style and discourse of papers within and across disciplines could hardly be described as unified A variable discourse such as this could be perceived as a combination of different styles, perhaps as a developmental feature of novice student writing; however, it did not appear to be the case that faculty viewed such hybridity as problematic in any sense The following excerpt, which comes from an advanced course in music, provides an example of this hybridity: Movement seven continues the joy from the fifth movement It is a duet for tenor and bass solo voice The movement is in ABA (da Capo) form The text is distributed in equal parts, three text lines for each section However, the B section is more condensed than the A section Also, section A is in the relative key D minor To symbolize the rejoicing of Jesus’ salvation, Bach sets the movement in a dance rhythm The gigue is rather unusual, because it is in 3/8, compared to the more common ones used by the composer The joyful character of the movement is emphasized by the chosen key, F major The animated rhythm brings an almost secular picture of lighthearted dances From m 104 to the end, Bach drops 558 According to Lillis (2003), monologic discourses emphasize “synthesis as the goal of meaning making” and “a version of dialectic governed by binary framings where one version of truth is privileged over others” (pp 195–196) TESOL QUARTERLY all the orchestra instruments, except the continuo The only existing continuo gives the singers an opportunity to present the text and to glitter and shine as the text narrates “Da glanz ich wie Sterne und leuchte Sterne und leuchte wie Sonne.” (ex 14) [Italics added throughout.] This passage comes from a term paper by Anna, a doctoral student from Bulgaria Anna’s work focuses on the relationship between text and music in a choral work by J S Bach, and its organization mirrors the musical score The student’s main task in this passage seems to be to translate the music into words using the appropriate vocabulary (e.g., “the B section is more condensed than the A section”) In this translation from music to text, Anna emphasizes the features of the work that stand out because they are atypical in some way (e.g., “the gigue is rather unusual”) Yet her description of the work is not limited to a technical analysis of the musical score itself She also strives to recreate the impression that the piece would have made on the reader if the reader were listening to it Such an effort could be explained by the fact that a score is written to be performed In particular, she uses adjectives that describe emotional and aesthetic characteristics, which add a poetic touch to her analysis (see italics) The matter-of-fact (“the movement is in ABA (da Capo) form”) and the poetic (“lighthearted dances”) coexist in her writing and create a discourse that is hybrid, neither conventionally academic nor conventionally poetic The technical and the poetic can be seen together even in phrasal units (e.g., “the joyful character of the movement”) and in instances when lyrics from the music spill over into her descriptive prose (“to present the text and to glitter and shine”7) Such a hybrid form of writing, in which the aesthetic description is part and parcel of the author’s interpretation of the work, has been documented in other areas of scholarship related to the arts (see Tucker’s [2003], analysis of art history) A more subtle type of variation may be found in a student text from CEE that comes from a section of a critical review assignment in which the student summarizes the Results and Discussion section of a journal article The critical review was written for an introductory graduate course on the biological principles of environmental engineering In this excerpt, Quan seems to establish two epistemic zones, one of tentative, uncertain hypotheses and claims and the second of solid, definitive findings ii) Microbial community: Samples analyzed before and after the storage period (90 days) showed that the fraction of EAP remained constant while the NOB fraction decreased during that period This implies that NOB decay faster than AOB at the storage conditions However, the The words glitter and shine are a possible translation of glanz and leuchte MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 559 performance of the reactors during this phase showed no nitrite accumulation, suggesting that the remaining NOB were more active than those at the beginning of the storage period The authors attributed this to net-like structures observed during phase I that could provide better accessibility to substrates During phase II (pure nitrification), it was found that the biofilm in both reactors was dominated by AOB and NOB In phase III (addition of organic substrate), the AOB community could not be detected in R2 and a heterotrophic community was observed in both reactors The heterotrophic community was more important in R2 than in R1 (the relative abundance of heterotrophic microorganisms in R2 was 60% as compared to 13% in R1) The authors explained that the reason why R2 had no ammonia removal after phase III was because a thick heterotrophic layer grew above the nitrifying biofilm, thereby increasing the oxygen mass transfer resistance Thus, if oxygen cannot diffuse through the mixed biofilm to reach the nitrifying biofilm, there will not be any ammonia removal Selective washout was ruled out because the authors found that nitrification re-established very fast (in 14 days) Since nitrifying bacteria are very slow growing microorganisms, it is not possible to have regrowth of the nitrifying community in 14 days The definite zone includes the first sentence of the first paragraph and the second paragraph, whereas the uncertain zone covers the second through fourth sentences of the first paragraph The suggested explanations and the solid explanations differ primarily in terms of the choice of reporting verbs (e.g., “implies,” “suggesting,” and “attributed” in the first paragraph contrasting with “found,” “was observed,” “explained,” and “ruled out” in the second paragraph), and the choice of modal verbs and expressions—“could provide” (possibility) in the first paragraph and “could not be detected” (failed attempt), “cannot diffuse,” “will not be,” “not possible to have” in the second paragraph In his analyses of research report genres, Swales (1990) noted certain kinds of stylistic differences, mainly across sections For example, he suggested that tense shifts within reviews of the literature might mark how the sources were being represented (with past, present perfect, and present tenses marking different degrees of acceptance and relevance to the present argument) Likewise, he noted that the methodology and discussion sections would be likely to vary in tense and modality The stylistic variation in this passage is precisely of this nature: the modality and tense usage vary in the two epistemic zones Nevertheless, both Anna’s and Quan’s passages show that such variations in style can occur not only across sections of a paper or within subsections of a larger section, but within paragraphs (Quan’s paper) and even within sentences (Anna’s paper) The two passages illustrate that in some cases it may be difficult to determine where the stylistic shifts occur and what functions they perform The student texts we analyzed suggest that aca560 TESOL QUARTERLY demic discourse encompasses diverse styles that blend and interact with each other and create hybrid discourses that are not simply collections of different components One could argue that the shifts between the poetic and the technical in Anna’s passage and the pronounced differences in the degree of certainty in Quan’s passage are different realizations within the spectrum of a homogeneous academic style Genre research has documented, for instance, that scientific articles consist of different moves (Swales, 1984), and that the degrees of certainty expressed by the authors within sections vary (see Hyland, 1998, for a discussion of hedging in scientific research articles) Nevertheless, when working with the data, we were intrigued by the extent of some of the variations we saw, and in particular by the way that hybridity (even if fully in keeping with the audience’s expectations) was not limited to clearly defined part-genres of articles or paragraphs with diverse communicative purposes and functions but seemed to be expressed at the level of the sentence and the phrase, to be emergent as well as conventional We feel that this feature of academic discourse deserves explicit mention primarily for pedagogical reasons Without entering into a fuller theoretical discussion of such discourse differences, we would simply point out that in our experience such variations in the degree of certainty are especially difficult for international students to detect in their reading and produce in their writing We also suspect that they are fairly tacit even for advanced native-English-speaking disciplinary writers.8 A classroom discussion of academic discourse that emphasizes its homogeneity may hinder international students from perceiving the range of attitudes toward experimental results that can readily be observed in academic writing The stylistic variation in Anna’s passage seems particularly hard to place within a single consistent discourse We would add to this hybridity in linguistic forms the multimodal heterogeneity seen earlier in Peter’s and Monica’s passages and the exhibit board because we view those other modalities as integral to their texts The specific character of such discursive hybridity in particular texts complicates the unity and integrity of broad generic labels, like research paper Multimodal and hybrid genre systems, in fact, represent a serious challenge to needs analysis In the next section, we discuss the challeng8 A perception of academic discourse as a homogeneous whole may also contribute to the widely shared though mistaken view that scholars in the sciences never argue or persuade but just present facts and allow them to speak for themselves In the course of data collection, we heard such statements from faculty in CEE Though some sections of most papers written in the sciences contain straightforward presentation of results, other sections contain clear evidence of authors making claims about uncertain issues and supporting those claims explicitly with evidence and reasoning Such significant variations in academic discourse may remain unnoticed if one expects it to be consistent in this respect MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 561 ing and relevant question of what can be done in EAP courses to help students navigate such diverse, complex, and dynamic discursive currents PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Findings of disciplinary, subdisciplinary, and course-based differences in discourse practices and genres could be, and have been, interpreted as a challenge to the whole project of needs analysis As Spack (2004) suggested, perhaps tasks are so situated in particular contexts that little specific knowledge is relevant to the diverse contexts of students’ writing However, the sociocultural perspective we take to studying practices and genres suggests a different conclusion, because it views genres not as autonomous domains of discourse but as deeply and intricately interwoven in the whole fabric of cultural-historical activity Although the examples analyzed came from different fields and although genres were clearly dynamic and strongly situated in particular contexts, it was also clear that key dimensions of genres (e.g., their variability, embeddedness in systems, multimodality, and hybridity) characterized discourses across varied contexts As a result, these features of genre cannot be ignored by an EAP curriculum that aims to prepare students for the writing practices they may encounter during their academic careers The complex linkages, resemblances, and relations among genres and discourses as well as differences between them are registered in notions of interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1992, 2004) and of the layering or lamination of social frameworks (Blommaert, 2005; Prior & Shipka, 2003) In fact, this interdiscursive mutability and usability— these affordances for what we might now call repurposing or recontextualization—are precisely what Bakhtin (1986) and Voloshinov (1973) highlighted in their dialogic models of genre In short, we suggest that these characteristics of multimodal genre systems can themselves serve as part of the basis for EAP writing courses for graduate students.9 Such courses should work to help students navigate multimodal chains of semiotic encounters, to focus on ways of linking different encounters and artifacts together, and to develop sensitivities and flexibilities that will be likely to aid students in perceiving, learning, critically assessing, and transforming the discourses and discourse practices they encounter Such features are different from the lexicogrammatical features that early genre analysis sought to identify They underscore the need for EAP curricula to support international 562 The findings of our study should be applicable both to EAP courses that serve students from the same discipline and to courses designed for students from a number of different disciplines TESOL QUARTERLY graduate students in becoming ethnographers of genre (Johns, 1997) but direct their investigations less at particular realizations of genres in specific disciplines and more at the ways in which people in the disciplines navigate among, weave together, and break up diverse genres to accomplish their goals An EAP curriculum that incorporates the findings of our study would encourage students to examine these kinds of commonalities in the ways in which genres function within and across disciplines and at the same time would highlight the contextual variability of genre that has been repeatedly documented in EAP research CONCLUSION The purpose of this article is primarily to draw attention to features of genres that have been documented but have remained marginal in EAP discourse The pervasiveness of the three anomalies drew our attention because most genre research in the field of EAP and the teaching resources based on such research still privilege the linguistic features of texts rather than the practices of genre systems That privileging is not surprising in view of EAP’s grounding in linguistic approaches, the historically close relationship in the United States between EAP and composition studies (Silva & Leki, 2004), and the nonlinear nature of the progression through different pedagogical practices in any field (Canagarajah, 2006) The current study, then, hopes to further fuel this movement away from “templates and taxonomies that many may still too readily think of when they think of genre” (Belcher, 2006, p 142, emphasis in the original) to promote greater attention to the ways that genre systems are welded together in activity and to stress the need for a fully multimodal or semiotic approach that considers the nature of processes as well as of final products Our findings also suggest that despite their profound variability and dynamism, genres are tied together by certain practices that can guide EAP researchers and practitioners in their efforts to help students better understand the nature of discourse in their disciplines ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments THE AUTHORS Daniella Molle is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, United States Her teaching experience and research interests are in the field of teaching English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) and, more specifically, in the teaching and learning of writing in ESL contexts She is especially interested in curriculum revision and teacher training MULTIMODAL GENRE SYSTEMS IN EAP WRITING PEDAGOGY 563 Paul Prior is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, United States, where he has served as Associate Director of the Center for Writing Studies and Director of Freshman Rhetoric His research explores the dialogic and situated nature of writing, reading, talk, learning, and disciplinarity REFERENCES Agha, A (2007) Language and social relations Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bakhtin, M (1986) Speech 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