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Recent work in applied linguistics has focused on genre from rhetorical, educational, and critical perspectives (e.g. Bazerman 1988, Bhatia 1993, Fairclough 2003, Hyland 2004, Johns 2002, Kress 1993, Paltridge 2001, Swales 1990, van Leeuwen 1993). The notion of genre has been important to an understanding of how cultures organize in linguistic ways. From Vladimir Propp's (1968) analysis of Russian folktales to William Labov's description of oral narratives (Labov & Waletzky 1967) and Bakthin's (1986) investigations of speech genres, linguists have found the idea of socially structured ways of using language to satisfy social purposes key in understanding the role of language in social life.
This valuable introduction to the genre theory of the Sydney School by Martin and Rose provides a theoretical and analytic framework to understand language as a form of social practice. The focus of the book is on genre as a configuration of meanings and map of culture. Here genre is defined as a staged goal-oriented social process. Genres are not only types of texts defined by formal structural or semantic features, but recurrent configurations of meaning produced by speakers and writers in the process of achieving some social purpose. Martin and Rose's genre theory is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a functional model of language and other forms of communication. They provide a rich description of several genres to inform discourse analysis, pedagogic work, and other research on language and culture. In addition, they also bring a critical perspective to our understanding of genre by highlighting how "social experience produces differences in access to the genre systems that have evolved in a culture" (18). This critical perspective is motivated by the authors' sociopolitical goal of contributing to equity and access in the ways language is taught in schools through the design of educational interventions. According to the authors, this approach to genre is...