Genre-based Materials

Course materials built around socially recognised text types — recounts, reports, expositions, procedures, narratives — rather than around grammatical structures or topics. The approach treats genres as the primary unit of teaching and learning, and shapes activities around the staged purposes that distinguish one genre from another.

The Sydney School roots

The strongest theoretical lineage runs from the Australian Sydney School, where Jim Martin, Joan Rothery, Frances Christie, and colleagues applied Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics to school literacy in the 1980s and 1990s. Their work analysed the texts learners had to write across the curriculum, identified recurring stages within each text type, and designed pedagogy that made these stages explicit. The aim was equity-driven — making the cultural capital of academic genres accessible to learners whose home backgrounds had not exposed them to it.

The teaching-learning cycle

The signature instructional sequence is Rothery's teaching-learning cycle, set out and elaborated in Feez and de Silva Joyce's Text-Based Syllabus Design (Macquarie University NCELTR, 1998). The cycle moves through context-building, deconstruction of a model text, joint construction of a new text with the teacher, and independent construction by the learner. Some accounts add a linking-related-texts phase that situates the genre against neighbouring text types.

Materials design implications

Genre-based materials open with a model text in the genre under focus, annotate its stages and language features, and walk learners through scaffolded reproduction before releasing them to independent production. Vocabulary and grammar enter where they serve the genre — the report's habitual present tense, the recount's circumstantial details — rather than as a parallel structural syllabus. This produces a tight coupling between texts, language items, and tasks.

Relationship to ESP and CLIL

Genre-based design naturally suits English for Specific Purposes and content-and-language-integrated programmes, because the target genres in these contexts are well-defined — the lab report, the case study, the policy brief. ELT for general adult learners uses the approach more selectively, since the relevant genres are less constrained.

References

• Feez, S., & de Silva Joyce, H. (1998). Text-Based Syllabus Design. National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University.
• Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. Equinox.
• Rothery, J. (1994). Exploring Literacy in School English (Write it Right Resources for Literacy and Learning). Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program.