JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

Radical sociopolitical and ideological changes of present-day Ukrainian society, resulting from the process of the former Soviet Union's "perestroika," have led to one undoubtedly positive consequence: Ukrainian researchers have obtained the opportunity to join the world community of scholars.¹ With the fall of the notorious "iron curtain," different forms of international scientific communication such as participation in conferences, research visits and direct exchanges of ideas through publications and personal contacts have become a long-awaited reality for researchers in Ukraine. Ukrainian scholars, whose intellectual rating was constantly one of the highest in the former Soviet Union, are now beginning their struggle for active membership in international scientific communities and appropriate recognition by their Western colleagues.

Currently, many of our scholars pay much attention to the possibilities of submitting their works to international journals published in English; it has become quite evident to them that such publications are the most effective means of presenting their ideas and communicating with other researchers. The publishing of papers, or at least conference abstracts in English, has become also a matter of prestige and a prerequisite for promotion at universities and other academic institutions. Thus, Ukrainian scholars are eager to publish their works anywhere— and in this respect they differ little from their colleagues of many non-English speaking countries who face the same situation.

The role of English as the predominant language of science and technology has always been acknowledged in the former Soviet Union. The system of Soviet education reflected this fact by establishing English for Specific Purposes (ESP) as a compulsory subject into the curricula of all universities and colleges. Primary attention in these courses of ESP was—and is still—paid to mastering the terminology of specific domains as well as to the acquisition of translation skills (mostly from English into Russian and other native languages of the former Soviet Union) and fundamentals of oral professional communication. Such particular attention to oral forms of language learning reflects the dominant type of instruction in the Soviet educational system, which is based on non-written forms of knowledge acquisition, control, and evaluation. Consequently, academic writing in native languages has never been taught in the former Soviet Union as a separate subject, and, hence, our postgraduates and beginning scholars have to master these skills based only on intuitive prompts or advice of their supervisors or more experienced colleagues.

At present, however, the means of entering the mainstream of world science through publications in English is gradually taking a more pragmatic shape. For example, the editorial boards of many Ukrainian academic journals require that scholarly publications be accompanied by abstracts in English. Different conferences or symposia choose English as one of their working languages and welcome the publications of at least part of the proceedings in it. All these new measures are, certainly, stimulating and helpful to a certain extent; and not surprisingly, a number of Ukrainian researchers have already become fruitful and successful contributors to international periodicals (mostly those who work in close collaboration with their Western colleagues). However, the majority of those scholars who make a serious decision to submit their papers to international journals confess that they have difficulties in conveying their ideas in English, although they consider their level of English competence to be generally adequate. Ukrainian research writers confess that they are not enough aware of the logic of persuasion, content structure and overall linguistic organization of English research texts, while they feel fewer apprehensions at the level of vocabulary (especially terminology) and syntactic patterns. At the same time, most of them realize that the help of the non-native translators in Ukraine will be insufficient or, sometimes, entirely inadequate to the author's purposes since it is almost impossible to find a translator equally familiar with the general conventions of academic writing in English and with this or that domain of research. The assistance of highly qualified native professional revisers is also doubtful (at least for Ukrainian scholars), partly because it is difficult to find them, partly due to possible financial problems. Thus, the only way out of this situation seems to consist in specific academic writing instruction, which would help them to convey and exchange their ideas in the way appropriate to their foreign audiences. This problem, quite new for Ukrainian foreign language pedagogy, requires a theoretical framework as well as the consideration of probable strategies of its realization. As far as the difficulties Ukrainian scholars meet can be identified, in sociocognitive terms as unawareness of genre conventions, I, therefore, assume that a genre-centered approach, which makes use of genre as a key concept, could offer a successful strategy to coping with this problem.

In recent years genre has become a popular category of pedagogy and foreign language teaching. It has been discussed in theoretical and applied aspects, increasingly with reference to the genre concept of M. Bakhtin, which I have chosen here as a theoretical starting point for the elaboration of the model of teaching academic discourse. Unfortunately, Bakhtin's genre theory, which actually anticipated the present-day reinterpretation of genre, has never had any influence on Soviet educational theories, though it provides direct pedagogical implications.

Bakhtin's concept of genre is built on the idea of the communicative function of language—the central notion of all his philological heritage. According to Bakhtin, language realizes itself in the form of utterances (vyskazyvanija), relatively stable types of which he called genres. For Bakhtin genre is a social phenomenon born by the specific goals and circumstances of human communication: "A particular function (scientific technical, commentarial, business, everyday) and the particular conditions of speech communication specific for each sphere give rise to particular genres. . ." (64). This functional task and particular sphere of communication determine genre as an inseparable unity of thematic content, style (linguistic choices) and compositional structure.

Extremely important is Bakhtin's idea of the constant interaction and mutual influence of speech genres, their endless dialogue within the common fields of their functioning: "Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere . . . Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication"(91). But every genre is related, as Bakhtin says, not only to the author of a concrete utterance but to its actual or potential recipients; participants of the act of communication, and this responsiveness (its orientation to the possible reaction) is an inherent feature of every genre, every utterance.

Here Bakhtin turns to the question of the degree to which genres are, as he says, "mandatory" and at the same time individual, creative utterances. "Speech genres are much more changeable, flexible and plastic than language forms are," remarks Bakhtin , but he considers them nevertheless to be normative, given for the speaking individuals, and not completely freely combined by them (80). The logical conclusion of this statement has a direct relevance to educational needs; as Bakhtin states, "to learn to speak means to learn to construct utterances" and, further, "the better our command of genres, the more freely we employ them, . . . the more perfectly we implement our free speech plan" (78, 80).

Thus, a full mastery of generic canons and conventions paves the way to free, individually marked but still contextually adequate manifestations of one's intentions; consequently, genre appears, through all its constraints (and actually by virtue of their power) to be a means of expressing individuality and creativity (to an extent, determined by the purposes of concrete genre users).

The nature of genre, therefore, is static and dynamic at the same time. Genre is a model, or a scheme, because through its normativity and regularity it serves as an example for constructing new utterances of the same kind; but any newly born utterance inevitably modifies the model adding some new features but still preserving its most essential ones. So genre is predictable and probabilistic, it is a product and a process, a canon and, simultaneously, its everlasting and creative renewal.

Although formulated more than half a century ago, Bakhtin's vision of genre as a social, goal-oriented, contextualized phenomenon is consistent with contemporary concepts. The rich amount of literature on genre, its origin and nature which has appeared since the 1970s, presents rethinking and reconceptualization of genre framed by socio-rhetorical, -cognitive and -cultural views. To a great extent, these reinterpretations have developed as an opposition to the "classical" notion of genre as formal and textual regularity; as Amy Devitt points out " the new conception of genre shifts the focus from effects (formal features, text classifications) to sources of those effects" (573).

The current notion of genre as a social action embedded in a wide sociorhetorical context was expressed in the most concise form by Carolyn Miller, whose definition of genres as typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations has become a starting point of the majority of papers dealing with genre as a social construct.

New reconceptions of genre with their antiformalistic spirit and setting in broad situational and cultural contexts has naturally appeared to match the interests and purposes of education in different countries (but not, unfortunately, in Ukraine, where the pedagogical potential of current genre concept has not yet attracted the attention of educationalists and, consequently, genre-based pedagogy does not exist). Genre theory in the unity of its theoretical and applied aspects has become the focus of research interests of groups of international scholars working in the fields of ESP and scientific discourse (e.g., Bazerman, Berkenkotter and Huckin, Bhatia, Duszak, Swales, Tickoo), composition studies (e.g., Devitt, Freedman, Kay), professional writing (e.g., Olsen and Huckin, Myers, Yates and Orlikowski), contrastive rhetoric (e.g., Mauranen, Ventola & Mauranen). It has also been the matter of constant interest for the representatives of systemic-functional approach (e.g., Christie, Cope and Kalantzis, Martin, Paltridge) who are concerned with the applications of the achievements of functional linguistics to different aspects of language education.

One of the most recognized theoretical frameworks is provided by John Swales in his book Genre Analysis. With unusual precision, Swales chose a set of criteria for genre characterization and elaborated a working definition of genre which successfully integrates the most essential aspects of sociorhetorical vision of genre—genre as a communicative event, with communicative purpose as a privileged criterion recognized by the parent discourse community. This definition also establishes the interconnection between the rationale of a genre (which is constituted by communicative purposes) and its formal features: "This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style" (58). Extremely important in this book is the notion of discourse community as a sociorhetorical entity with shared interests, which bridges sociological and linguistic views of discourse analysis and is important for understanding contextual influences on different types of discourse.

The merit of Swales's work lies in its applicability to concrete educational tasks arising from the author's concerns to help researchers, native, and (which is still more important for us) non-native speakers, to master the conventions of academic discourse. Proceeding from his theoretical assumptions, Swales developed a rhetorical and content-based approach to teaching academic writing reflected, for example, in his CARS (Create a Research Space) model—a set of rhetorical moves in research article introductions, which present writer's intentions in accordance with the laws of a genre. The same approach, though much more linguistically framed, is demonstrated in his and Christine Feak's textbook Academic Writing for Graduate Students, which has already proved to be extremely helpful and useful for non-native speakers of English (both students and scholars).

However, the teaching materials (and strategies) of this kind are usually designed for non-native speakers who live and study in Anglophone environments (for example, foreign students at US universities), a situation very different from that of Ukrainian scholars. Therefore, with the acknowledgment of what has already been done by Swales and other ESP researchers for practical purposes of teaching academic writing, I still feel the necessity of modifying their pedagogical approaches with due regard for the specific conditions under which Ukrainian scholars will receive their training. As far as these conditions are marked by the absence of direct linguistic impact of the English-speaking world, the problem of verbal shaping of research genres and their linguotextual structure becomes of crucial importance for "novices" in the "Anglophone game" such as Ukrainian scholars. At present, genre is more frequently referred to as a social and rhetorical construct than as a functional linguistic phenomenon with a standardizing power. Still, every genre possesses—or more precisely speaking, is realized through—formal features (obvious enough to a different degree in different genres), or, as Devitt states, genre becomes "visible through perceived patterns in the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of particular texts" which could be specified (580). With these inherent patterns, genre acts as a language restrictor, establishing its own rules of linguogeneric etiquette, the acquisition of which is a necessary prerequisite of its successful use as a means of communication. For non-native speakers, genres represent the "ways of making meaning in a culture" realized in a foreign language, and, therefore, generic sociorhetorical constraints are naturally associated by language "outsiders" with specific linguistic aspects (Christie 22). Enculturation—the adoption of the beliefs and values of a culture, as a necessary part of genre learning— becomes primarily a linguistic process for neophytes, isolated from appropriate language environments and discourse communities.

The linguistic aspect of genre learning is extremely important for Ukrainian research writers not only because they are outside of the pan-Western Anglophone world, but also because they represent the "high-context" Soviet academic tradition (based on the indisputable recognition of certain beliefs and values) which is still visible, despite changes in ideology in the works of post-Soviet scholars. In "high-context" cultures, meanings and their perception depend highly on the established relationships of ideas within certain fields; in a "low-context" English-speaking Western culture, verbalization of every meaning or thought plays a very important role. Thus, the knowledge of its genre-determined linguistic development is of great significance. I argue, therefore, that the linguocognitive approach to teaching genres, which is centered on the acquisition of linguistic genre-relevant patterns with due regard for their interconnection with rhetorical, content, and contextual (cultural) aspects of genre would match most effectively the interests and needs of Ukrainian academics.

I view a pedagogical model of teaching research genres as a three-stage or three-level process of explicit instruction with the first introductory, or explanatory stage followed by two subsequent ones corresponding to the aspects of genre in the spirit of Bakhtinian dichotomy: "product" and "process," "static scheme" and "dynamic reproduction" which may be visualized schematically in the following way:

The aim of the first explanatory stage will lie in clarifying the theoretical aspects of genre as a social construct, including such important points as communicative purpose and its crucial impact on genre formation, and the sociocultural placement of the discourse community of Western scholars as the one which produces genres and consumes them (with the close reference to its role of the audience for newcomers). This theoretical part can be followed by the second, prescriptive stage, the goal of which will be directed at the acquisition of conventions of genre as a static and reiterative phenomenon. This stage will be elaborated in the paper at much greater length as far as I consider it to be the core of my model. I will return to the third stage—genre as a dynamic process—after discussing the second one in more detail.

The task of the prescriptive stage requires a deliberate choice of types of genres. From the linguistic point of view it is convenient to differentiate or draw a line of demarcation between the notion of register and that of genre. I share the understanding of register, or functional language variation, "as contextual category, correlating with groupings of linguistic features" (Gregory and Carroll 4). Registers are characterized by a rather broad communicative orientation and their linguistic shaping may be defined only as a tendency of linguistic choices. In contrast, genres have a much more definite content and verbal structure; they impose constraints primarily on the level of discourse organization, have clear beginnings and ends, and can be realized only in completed texts. The correlation between registers, genres, and texts may be shown, according to Nina Razinkina, in the following way: genres are realized through registers, and registers are realized through language; genres exist in the form of completed texts and (from a purely linguistic point of view) are themselves types (or models) of texts.

The roles of genres within a certain register are different: some frequently occurring genres may be viewed as central (such as the article, monograph, conference abstract), and others, less "popular"—as peripheral (e.g., the advertisement in research journals). The structural linguistic features of genres may be roughly subdivided into obligatory (which are predictable and play a leading role in genre identification) and optional (functioning within the sphere marked by obligatory elements). The correlation of these features influences the degree of linguistic variability of this or that genre, the degree of its textual "rigidity." The scholarly article, the conference abstract, the research journal paper can be referred to as "rigid" genres while the lecture or the conference presentation exemplify "non-rigid" ones. From the pedagogical point of view "rigid" genres are much more preferable for analysis and acquisition due to their relatively unvarying, more distinct structure. Among research genres, the article and the conference abstract may be defined as central "rigid" genres, and, in general terms, their role in the dissemination of theoretical ideas and research results has always been extremely significant and widely recognizable by the members of research communities. Thus, the second level of my genre-based model will be devoted to teaching the writing of research articles and conference abstracts as the most important vehicles of communication in the sphere of scholarship.

The stage can be subdivided into a number of steps, or moves. The first move I view as dedicated to extensive genre reading—for instance, the reading of English and Ukrainian research articles and abstracts using a comparative genre analysis. I would emphasize contrastive, English-Ukrainian reading and analysis, since the comparison of the native and target languages cannot be avoided in the specific context of teaching English in Ukraine. Mother tongues usually play a significant role in second language acquisition in the situation when it is learnt outside the native sphere of its functioning. Comparison of native and non-native languages is furthermore important for genre acquisition, which inevitably implies the interaction and interplay of cultural factors. Contrastive genre analysis (on various textual levels) will undoubtedly stimulate learners' cross-cultural awareness of how genre constraints operate in different languages, and will steer them to appropriate uses and help to avoid inappropriate ones. The aim of contrastive genre analysis at this stage consists in showing the interconnection between the communicative orientation of genre and its contextual placement in different cultures as well as their impact (and manifestations) on various levels of rhetoric, content and overall linguistic structure of the compared texts. Such genre analysis will make the verbal texture of genre visible and contextualized. Certainly, it will be a kind of meta analysis which can best be elaborated by linguists and then be used by teachers as guidelines (and sometimes prompts) for those involved in the process of learning.

The important task of this step lies in developing the sensitivity of learners to the interaction of bottom and top-level genre features, which can be stimulated, according to Winser, by constant shuttling between these two macro- and micro-levels in the process of reading and analysis.

The second task of this move will be directed at highlighting the obligatory linguistic elements which encode the most essential rhetorical and content aspects of genre (such as the aspects of text cohesion—reference and theme, or dominant patterns of transitivity and modality). This task sometimes contains the threat of losing sight of the interconnection between content and formal generic structures; but the challenge of this possible danger may be neutralized by the gradual movement of comparative analysis from broader linguocognitive units (mentioned above) to smaller lexicogrammatical features of English research texts. The pedagogical success of such an analysis will largely depend on the type of tearchers's guidance which should foster the individual analytical activity of learners by helpful prompts than indicate or prescribe separate patterns. The analysis could result in singling out the most typical textlinguistic features based on obligatory generic elements, which would be practiced during the following step.

This step will be devoted to specific activities playing the role of preliminary training before starting the composition of research texts. They may include: 1) some activities traditional for TEFL practice, such as paraphrasing, filling the gaps in larger structural units or reordering them; 2) exercises on matching (or finding) English-Ukrainian or Ukrainian-English equivalents of certain patterns; 3) and more complicated tasks, which involve, perhaps, linguistic changes (choices) related to text cohesion or other aspects of the overall structure of research texts. The ultimate aim here is to help our researchers to modify their "high-context" tradition of academic writing.

On acquiring basic linguogeneric structures learners can start composing (under teacher's guidance) the texts of research genres. The emphasis of this last move of the second stage should be rather on the technique of composing and writing than on a final product. The learners will explore the grammatical and discoursal features of model texts in order to raise their rhetorical self-consciousness about likely audience expectations and reactions. Such model texts could be artificially constructed with the purpose of exemplifying this or that research genre, though I think, that it is far better to choose an authentic text, most typical of a research article or a conference abstract, so that it could perform the role of a "natural" model. I regard exploration of models as a tool for acquiring necessary linguistic "skeletons" of genres which could serve as a basis for developing linguocognitive skills of adequate selection and expression; they will further become the focus of the third stage devoted to teaching and learning genre as a dynamic reproduction of the conventional scheme.

At this stage the learners will try to realize themselves as individual and creative writers able to express their ideas through a certain generic code. They have, therefore, to develop such skills of writing which would help them to overcome the conflict of the original and the conventional (so often emphasized by Bakhtin) in every genre and turn it into a liberating, meaning-making force. The role of the teacher at this stage will gradually change from that of an explicit instructor to an unobtrusive and unassertive advisor of the dominant activity of the stage—extensive individual writing with an emphasis on the final result. I think, that at the first move of this stage learners can make use of the "jigsaw technique,"which consists in "lifting" expressions from authentic papers, combining them and adding some of the writer's own (St. John 118). At first glance, the jigsaw strategy may seem close to text modeling, but its essential difference lies in that fact that the authors themselves choose what they consider to be most appropriate for their individual texts. This approach will be productive for non-native writers, who always feel the lack of linguostylistic resources; the "jigsaw technique," by supplying verbal material, will "soften" language constraints and enrich learners' linguistic potential.

The model might be also complemented by the fourth stage, focused on "soft" genres characterized by non-rigid linguistic structure with multi-generic features (e.g., popular science narrative). However, from the purely pragmatic point of view, at present, when Ukrainian scholars are in strong need of fundamentals of academic writing, this stage does not seem to be of primary importance.

This model is, certainly, a kind of a general outline, which will be elaborated and specified in the process of the future research. It reflects explicit instruction, the efficacy and usefulness of which has been recently doubted. For example, Aviva Freedman argues that explicit genre teaching is unnecessary as far as genre knowledge is "tacit" and can be acquired by learners (school children and university undergraduates whom she observed) without any specific guidance (231). Moreover, Freedman warns that conscious efforts may lead to the "overlearning and misapplication" of generic features (226). I think, however, that Freedman's arguments may be considered only in the context of native speakers' literacy development. The non-native speakers who live outside the Anglophone milieu and appropriate discourse communities can achieve control over written genres only through special instruction in the structural and linguistic features of target texts. The fully "situated" approach to genre learning which, perhaps, promotes deeper socialization into a discourse community, is not possible for such neophytes as Ukrainian researchers, who are economically and culturally separated from the Western world. The conscious acquisition of the formal elements of texts (without, certainly, losing sight of their rhetorical features) can essentially help such "outsiders" to master research genres adequately to their urgent need of establishing contacts with international audience.

At the same time I agree with Freedman that a deliberate focus on certain linguistic elements causes sometimes their mis- or overuse and, in the case of non-native speakers, may even lead to composing texts with a rather eclectic combination of native and target discoursal features (I suspect that this paper itself is such a hybrid text with some Western features, which are subordinated to the general tone of theoretical cogitation, typical of Soviet academic discourse!). However, for non-native speakers the benefits of visible teaching based on the analysis and acquisition of linguocognitive units are far more evident than possible negative consequences.

The introduction at Ukrainian universities of such a subject as academic writing (for post-graduate students, and, probably, in the form of a special intensive course for experienced scholars) will definitely require a number of considerable theoretical and practical efforts on the side of teachers and linguists. Still, teaching and learning genres will bring not only pragmatic results but also have broad cognitive consequences. The process of mastering genres of any language enriches the learners with great resources of expressing and sharing their thoughts and experiences. Grasping the dual, almost paradoxical nature of genre, they naturally come to the comprehension of the relativity and power of its constraints, which liberate the author's ego and provide him or her with the tools of self-expression and communication with others. The knowledge of genre helps to realize the relationships between the social and the individual and, therefore, it arms the learners with the understanding of possible social roles inseparable from their own identities. As to genres as the means of intellectual exploration, they perform a heuristic function, and having the privilege of providing new knowledge, they are also great empowering factors.

The cognitive value of understanding genres of foreign languages is still more important, since they bring awareness of other cultures and of the national proclivities of professional disciplines. If we base our teaching on the conception of genre as a culture-specific phenomenon, we are then challenged by the question of to what extent the "outsiders" have to adopt the generic conventions, in our case, of Anglophone Western culture. The contextualized, dual (social-individual) origin of genre presupposes the links and interaction of ideas and identities (including national), which push their way through (and due to) constraining borders of genre. The attempt of separating ideas and identities (when the ideas are decontextualized and presented as bare, impoverished abstractions) or of fusing them (when the domination of the cultural aspect of discourse makes it "indigestible" for representatives of another cultures) may lead to deconstruction of genre as a communicative means. Ideally, non-native genre learners must strive for reflecting their ideas and positions with due regard for the limitations and assumptions of the generic code of a target culture. In our case, Ukrainian scholars have to be "westernized" to such a degree as to ensure the adequate perception of their ideas, inseparable from their cultural identities (certainly, the degree of national originality varies in different spheres; it is much more explicit in humanities, than in sciences marked by the universality of cognitive paradigms).

Undoubtedly, it is easier to make such a statement than to try to achieve this "ideal" balance in a concrete text; but the success of a novice writer will depend also on those, whom Bakhtin called the others, the addressees of utterances- genres (94). Every genre, as an act of communication and human interaction, implies ethical consensus based on the mutual recognition and understanding of certain grounds and norms. And if Western scholars—the new addressees of Ukrainian research writers—would appraise not only the proper rhetorical structure and contextuality of an academic text written by an "outsider," but its cultural originality, it would certainly promote the process of cultural interaction and linking, necessary for harmonious development of world science and knowledge.