What is Genre? Genre text

The term genre is concerned with the overall purpose of a text. Genres are defined as social processes which are goal oriented and which achieve their purposes in steps or  stages. To describe a genre, we need to describe the form of texts of the genre; the context in which the genre is relevant, in which participants may use the genre to organize, expain what they ae doing and why; the activities by which people create and share the knowledge required to produce text in genre; how the genre works in interaction; how people draw on the generic conventions in creating new text, how they use the genre to categorize situations, how the genre serves to maintain the status quo and or make change possible.

According to Paltridge (2000: 107), genre is culture, specific and has particular purposes, stages and linguistics features assosiated with them, the meaning of which need to be interpreted in ralation to the cultural social contexts in which they occur.

Genre is a social process because members of culture interact to achieve them, they are goal-oriented because they have evolved to achieve things, they are staged because meanings are made in steps and it usually takes writers more than one sep to reach their goal (Hyland, 2004: 2004 ).

In learning alanguage(English), or in producing certain text, one is always involved with contexts, both of context of culture and context of situation. Language lives in a certain culture, so, if one want to learn English, he or she must learn the culture of it. The following scheme is the description of the relationship between context and text.

Genre text

According to the scheme above, it can be explained that the context of culture and situation influences people to produce text or language. When producing a text, one is involved with the context of situation, so it influences him to choose the appropriate way of using the language; Field is the topic talked, Tenor is the interpersonal relationship between the language users, Mode is the communication’s way being used, either spoken or written communication. Shortly, text/language is the product of the context of culture and situation.

In the correlation between genre and register, based on the scheme above, the writer can give an example as follows:

Field    : Economy: motorcycles

Tenor   : buyer and seller

Mode   : face-to-face (oral communication)

It explains that the topic is about the transactional activity of buying and selling motorcycles, the language users are between buyer and seller. They use oral communication (face to face).