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Genres, ICT and language learning

Digital Genres
Although there are many definitions of genre, virtually all of them include the ideas of ownership by a discourse community and social acceptance by this community (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Kwasnik and Crowston, 2005). Modern genre theory emphasises the role of genres in social interaction. Genre is seen as a multidimensional phenomenon, which must be defined taking into account not only textual features but also the processes involved in producing and interpreting the texts (Paré and Smart, 1994). Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) note down five basic features in the concept of genre: dynamism, situatedness, form and content, duality of structure, and community ownership. Indeed, they refer to genres as dynamic rhetorical forms developed by actors' responses to recurrent situations within social communicative activities. All these features are central to understanding the nature and emergence of digital genres.

Dynamism and change are inherent components of any genre: genres are reproduced, but they are also modified by expert users in an attempt to adapt them to new sociocognitive needs. A genre variant appears when “a new conjunction of form and purpose becomes recognised by its community as different from the old” (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994: 545). Another important feature of genres is that they “do not exist in a vacuum” (Kwasnik and Crowston, 2005: 11): they are socially situated and closely related to and dependent on the other genres used by the discourse community that owns them. The literature on genres describes several concepts based on these relations: “genre system” (Bazerman, 1995), “genre repertoire” (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994) or “genre ecologies” (Spinuzzi and Zachry, 2000). The concept of genre ecology is particularly interesting for the study of digital genres because it emphasises the idea of dynamism and adaptability to meet new needs of the community. Since “genres exist in habitats of communities of practice” (Kwasnik and Crowston, 2005: 11), changes in any member of the habitat will have effects on other members. This interrelationship between genres is one of the issues worth considering when researching digital genres, but there are other fundamental aspects that should also be taken into account in order to understand them: dynamism and change, functionality, convergence of different technologies and multimodality, and blurring of the boundaries between writer and reader.

Digital Genres and Language Learning
From a socioconstructivist perspective of pedagogical practice (Bruner, 1984; Vygotski, 1962) it is essential to be aware of both the language learners’ psychopragmatic representations and the changes that hypermedia-mediated communication is bringing about. Pedagogical mediation should take into account such a technology-mediated context in order to help in the construction of scaffoldings between languages and learners as web-users.

Since genres may constitute a framework in which reader and writer meet, our concern is to investigate both the new norms that allow readers and writers to establish a dialogue and the new competences that enable them to access the complex structures of hypermedia texts. In the case of digital texts, there is close relationship between text and action (i.e. users read digital texts to do things). As Kwasnik and Crowston (2005: 7) point out, “in terms of genres of digital documents, the questions that arise are whether digital genres emerge from what people do on the Web, or the technology itself affords ways of doing things that people can then discover and exploit”. In our view, the new literacy is a bidirectional and interactive phenomenon: the possibilities afforded by the medium result in new frames of textual organisation that are negotiated by means of new social-semiotic practices in the discursive practice. These new social-semiotic practices are the result of the confluence of three factors: hypertextual structure, multisemioticity, and new forms of interaction. For instance, an informative text provides information at different degrees of specialisation depending on the hypertextual links activated by the user and on the decisions regarding the possible reading paths to follow. This process of decision taking relies on the use of semiotic abilities involving reading and interpreting multimodal codes that contribute to the construction of meaning in digital texts. Another example of new social semiotic practices derives from the blurring of boundaries in digital texts. In many cases, informative texts have features of argumentation and seek to induce the purchase of goods or services. This results in changes in the communicative scenarios or frames and in the fluctuation of social roles.

In order to determine the new competences that learners will need to interpret and use digital genres, it is necessary to keep in mind that genres are continuously evolving, which calls for research both on already-existing genres, their transformation and the hybridisation processes they are currently undergoing (i.e., generic echoes and genre mixing-up) and the new characteristics of what has so far been understood as generic frameworks. Understanding this transformation process demands the use of terms that enable us to describe the dynamism, multiplicity, graduality and interdiscursivity of genres. Such concepts can be used to analyse different textual and discursive aspects: (i) macrotextual and schematic aspects; (ii) multisemiotic aspects as indicators of textual connectivity and (iii) interlinguistic and intercultural aspects.

  1. Macrotextual and schematic aspects. Digital texts are characterised by their rhizomatic structure, which opens up multiple possible paths (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991:6). The parts of a rhizome have a non-hierarchical relationship and it is the action itself that sets a possible link among the different parts. Lemke (2003) notes that genres have become “raw material” for transgeneric and flexible constructions, which are the result of users’ navigation and reading paths according to specific reading goals within a particular context. In contrast to the clear boundaries that separate closed structures, hypertextual structures, like rhizomes, can be interrupted at any point and restarted again through any accessible point on the navigation path. Likewise, we can refer to the “fuzzy boundaries of genres”. Their semantic-pragmatic delimitation becomes flexible and the link system makes it possible to navigate from a textual structure (i.e., origin) to another one (i.e., target). Generic structures become fuzzy in order to be open to other texts, paving the way for generic mixture, which facilitates intertextual relationships (i.e., hybridity, intertextuality) (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar, 2001). The language learner as user-reader is expected to make decisions when changing from a navigation mode to a reading mode. These decisions will be guided by his/her goals, his/her hypotheses (i.e., generic echoes evoked by the specific text, hypotheses on the link target) and by the markers of textual connectivity.

  2. Multisemiotic aspects as indicators of textual connectivity. Although images belong to the cognitive dimension, they have received little attention in higher education (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). However, the nature of hypermedia sites on the Web brings to the foreground the need to develop multiple literacies (Sankey and Nooriafshar, 2005), since multimodality is part of path multiplicity (Kress, 2003) and becomes a central element of textual connectivity. Traditional genre theory states that genre depends on conventional sequencing patterns. However, drawing on Halliday’s concept of cohesive harmony, Lemke (2003) notes that the phases of text organisation, the syntagmatic units, the semantic chains and the interrelated semantic chains (i.e., clusters) work in parallel and their boundaries may not coincide with generic sequences. Traditional studies on genre have primarily focused on structural regularities, textual aspects (e.g., chains of semantic cohesion, thematic progression) being of minor interest. The analysis of hypermedia genres, though, brings to light the need to analyse cohesion chains taking two aspects into account: the multimodal interaction among the different semiotic levels in a text (i.e., images, graphics, sound, video, text), and the reader’s construction of transgeneric meaning units through the multiple possible paths offered by a hypertextual structure. Investigating how this process of meaning construction takes place in the reader’s mind involves analysing multiplicity and multimodality as interactive phenomena within the reading and writing processes. It is necessary to establish a dialogue between hypertextual writing and reading processes, which we will refer to as the wreading process of the text.

  3. Interlinguistic and intercultural aspects. The multiplicity of paths and the interdiscursive nature of digital genres allow language multiplicity and open up a new space where the tense relationship between globalisation trends and multicultural reality associated to multilingualism can be observed. The new sociosemiotic practices also involve the development of an intercultural and interlinguistic competence as an integrative part of a new literacy which comprises multiple literacies.

The present study focuses mainly on macrotextual and schematic aspects. Nevertheless, our dynamic view of generic constructions leads us to consider those aspects of textual connectivity that may be related to the transgeneric constructions (Lemke, 2003) that the learner as a wreader may elaborate in his/her wreading process. Likewise, we consider that the study of the intercultural dimension should be included in any work on digital genres, since it constitutes one the most important aspects in the development of an integrated multilingual competence. Such a competence enables learners to reflect on their language and culture learning and to improve their language learning autonomy.

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