5 - Genres and Multiliteracies

Summary

Chapter 5 expands on Johns’s socioliterate view of writing development to integrate her view within the mutually beneficial fields of genre theory or analysis and broader fields such as Second Language Acquisition, rhetoric and composition studies. Using survey research, this chapter explores researchers’ writing strategies and resources to compose traditional and new digital genres in one or more languages. In acknowledging the pedagogical value of individual experiences accumulated in writing practices, this chapter also attaches value to ‘generic interdiscursivity’, as prior genre knowledge can scaffold the composing process of other genres, both written, spoken and hybrid, through strategies of connectivity across discursive practice. The chapter critically supports Gentil’s important claim of ‘biliteracy’ in genre practices, or the use of previous genre knowledge in one language to compose genres in other languages. Corpus data illustrate aspects of multimodal rhetoric and the construction of visual scientific arguments in multisemiotic genres and in multilingual genre sets.