22 Negotiating Genre: Lecturer's Awareness in Genre Across the Curriculum Project at the University Level

Abstract

It has been said that genres created in each "area of human activity" (Bakhtin, 1953-54) or by "discourse communities" (Swales, 1990) are shared b y "participants in these various areas" or "expert members of communities". However, at least in Argen tina, conventions of academic genres are not comple tely done (Moyano, 2000; 2001). Most of the new research ers recognize they have difficulties to produce the m and MA students fail in presenting their post- graduati on thesis or delay them too much. Pre-graduated stu dents show very short skills at solving writing tasks ass igned by their lecturers in Spanish as a mother ton gue. Based on that we have detected in an action research proj ect (Moyano & Natale, 2006), it is possible that le cturers are lack of awareness of the genres they want their stu dents to write and -most of them- are not aware tha t these genres must be taught. Based on J.R. Martin's Genre & Register Theory, strategies for negotiating genr es are being developed in the project mentioned above for the purpose of teaching academic literacy at the un iversity level, what has incidence in construction of knowle dge and insertion in the academic community. This negotiation is made between each lecturer and the l inguist who is associated to his/her work with stud ents in the context of the subjects they teach. The linguists b ecame mediators between lecturers and students, gui ding the production of resources for teaching genres. In thi s paper we will discuss this negotiation procedure in terms of its theoretical possibility and legitimacy. The arg umentation will be made taking into account some re sults of progressing lecturers' awareness of genres and thei r need of being taught.

Full text

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22 Negotiating Genre: Lecturer’s Awareness
in Genre Across the Curriculum
Project at the University Level
Estela Inés Moyano
introduction
It has been said that genres created in each “area of human activity” (Bakhtin,
1953-54) or by “discourse communities” (Swales, 1990) are shared by “partici-
pants in these various areas” or “expert members of communities.” However, at
least in Argentina, researchers and post-graduate students are not fully familiar
with the conventions of expected academic genres, as we have found in previous
ethnological research (Moyano, 2000, 2001). Most new researchers realize they
have diculties in producing their scientic/academic texts, and MA and PhD
students delay or do not complete their theses. Pre-university and undergraduate
students, as well, show limited skills at solving writing tasks assigned by lectur-
ers in Spanish as a mother tongue (Ezcurra, 1995; Ameijide, Murga, Padilla,
& Douglas, 2000; Pereira & Di Stéfano, 2001; UNLu., 2001; Zalba, 2002;
Cubo de Severino, 2002; Murga, Padilla, Douglas, & Ameijide, 2002; Moyano,
2003a).
It could be said, then, that this sharing of genres does not occur as a natural
process, just by being in contact with them. As Swales (1990) suggests, new
members of each community should be “initiated” by the experts. Or, as Martin
and Rose (2007) emphasize, genres must be taught in the educational formal
system or working places. According to these authors and other scholars of the
Sydney School, teachers don’t have genre consciousness. en, the job of lin-
guists is to identify and name the dierent kinds of texts that are found,
looking closely at the kinds of meaning involved—using global
patterns to distinguish one text type from another and more local
patterns to distinguish stages within a text. Recurrent global pat-
terns were recognized as genres, and given names. . . . Recurrent
local patterns within genres were recognized as schematic struc-
tures, and also labeled. (Martin & Rose, 2007)
Martin denes genre as “a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which
speakers engage as members of our culture” (1984), or “—more technically—as

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a particular conguration of register variables of eld, tenor and mode” (Martin
& Rose, 2003, 2007). “is means that genres are dened as a recurrent cong-
uration of meanings and that they enact the social practices of a given culture.”
So, the global patterns of academic, scientic and professional texts are re-
lated to human activities and meanings in each of these cultures. ese specic
practices with specic purposes are realised in texts according to the institutions
and the eld of knowledge, the participants involved and the role played by
language. To be part of these social areas, where language is constitutive of the
activities with some participation of multimodality, the students need to know
what kind of practices, relationships between participants and dierent kind of
texts take place in each area, and what resources of language are available to con-
strue meaning. So, students need to be taught dierent genres in the academy
and “how they relate to one another” (Martin & Rose, 2007) to be members of
these cultures.
Academic activity across the curriculum demands more complex discursive
practices while students reach a new step in their careers. ese practices are
related to disciplinary contents and research, technological development and
professional life. So, they have to deal with theoretical concepts and produce
texts in various genres. ese activities are new for them, so they need to learn
new genres, in which language is the main important resource: not only con-
struing meaning (disciplinary concepts and their relations) but realising prac-
tices as social activities. In written and oral texts in these cultures, language
is reective and constitutive of the genre, with dierent kinds and degrees of
multimodality. If students at the end of their career cannot manage this kind
of text, they will be excluded from the University, scientic activities and/or
working places.
José Luis Coraggio (1994) identies two kinds of causes for the undergradu-
ate educational crisis in Argentina: poor skills in learning from reading texts
combined with a lack of abilities for solving problems, and frequent disrup-
tions in studies and attrition from academic programs. ese two factors, the
academic diculties and the individual lack of continuity of studies, might be
related to each other.
academic literacy in argentina: a brief review
ere are dierent proposals about how to do the work of teaching
academic literacy at the University: to oer writing courses outside the
subjects (taught by linguistics lecturers); to teach academic literacy inside
the subjects (taught by the subject lecturer as member of the discourse
community); to give special training to advanced students who become
tutors. ese proposals were developed in the Writing Across the Curriculum

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movement, largely in the United States (McLeod & Soven, 1992;
Marinkovich Ravena & Mirán Ramírez, 1998; Fullwiller & Young, 1982)
and they are applied in some isolated practices in Argentina (UNLu, 2001).
However, there are other approaches that focus on teaching genre in other
traditions: ESP, applied especially in teaching academic literacy in English as
a foreign language; and some SFL, applied in English in several universities
and in Spanish in the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS).
Despite these initiatives, Carlino (2003) has said that the universities in
Argentina have the tendency to ignore that written activities aect knowledge
acquisition and understanding. Professors only assign writing to evaluate learn-
ing, but not to develop the learning process. To reach this conclusion, Car-
lino carried out exploratory qualitative research, analyzing students’ discourse,
teaching programs and papers oered in education and literacy conferences. She
found, as a result, that there are 30 universities where some professors teach
academic literacy in their disciplinary classes, but without institutional support.
ese proposals—she says—are based on Writing Across the Curriculum move-
ment (WAC), Process Pedagogy (Murray, 1982) and ESP (Dudley-Evans, 1994;
Swales, 1990).
In a similar review, conclusions of “La lectura y la escritura como prácticas
académicas universitarias” Conference (UNLu, 2001) identify two kinds of
proposals in Argentina, which are represented by two groups, and remark too
about the lack of institutional support for these initiatives. e rst group
includes remedial courses in pre-undergraduate studies or for freshmen, ori-
ented to ll in the gaps left by “defective” schooling. is perspective implies
that secondary schools have to teach “general abilities” for writing, rather than
discourse abilities in context. e job is assigned to Spanish professors or read-
ing and writing specialists. ese proposals are based on theories of texts as
autonomous objects, cognitive processes, pragmatics and rhetorical discourse,
ESP and New Rhetoric—following Hyland’s classication (2002).
e second group is formed by university professors of dierent disciplines,
who conceive of reading and writing development as strongly related to each
discipline’s knowledge construction. ey assign students very complex tasks of
reading and writing, but they only teach the concepts of the discipline. Others
try to combine teaching discipline and literacy practices as socialization into the
community. Again following Hyland’s classication (2002) they apply cognitive
theories, expressivist views of writing, writing as cognitive process, knowledge
telling and knowledge-transforming models.
Carlino’s approach is that students get into disciplinary contents through
reading and writing practices: they interpret, assimilate and engage other cog-
nitive processes to understand a specic eld. It follows, in her view, that the
lecturer’s duty is to work on academic literacy in their specic subject as a fun-

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Negotiating Genre
damental tool for learning (2005), but she lacks a linguist perspective to help
students in this process.
However, it doesn’t seem that disciplines’ lecturers have got the tools for do-
ing this job. In fact, although Carlino proposes very interesting and useful in-
terventions and literacy practices with her students, it is obvious that her work
needs more specic linguistic knowledge and specied techniques for consoli-
dating student’s learning in literacy.
the prodeac program
Taking into account students’ limited literacy skills in Argentina—mentioned
above—the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS)2 gives a com-
pulsory introductory workshop in literacy for all students before they start their
careers. Although the workshop lasts seven months, there is not enough time to
teach all genres that students will face across the curriculum, nor is there time
to develop a theoretically and technically grounded view of texts. So, we have
selected to teach at this stage some “basic genres” that are often combined in aca-
demic macro-genres (Moyano, 2005) and a literature report (Pereira, Moyano,
& Valente, 2005).
In the First Cycle of the curriculum, which lasts two and a half years, profes-
sors say that students have serious problems in reading literature recommended in
their classes. is assumption is based on written examinations, in which students
answer some questions about fundamental concepts and, sometimes, relationships
between them. In the Second Cycle—2 and a half more years—lecturers complain
about student’s writing and oral skills in using academic language and structuring
more complex texts. erefore, in 2002, lecturers from the Instituto de Industria
of the UNGS asked for our help as linguists, because professors have failed in help-
ing students to improve their academic literacy3.
Based on theoretical assumptions about genres, teaching and learning, and
taking into account lecturers’ complaints and requests from students, we have
designed a Project to Develop Literacy Across the Curriculum (PRODEAC)
to apply in the Second Cycle (Moyano & Natale, 2003)4. is project was re-
fused twice by the Consejo Superior—the collegiated government organ of the
University. is fact indicates the lack of institutional support for these kind of
programs in Argentina (UNLu, 2001; Carlino, 2003, 2004, 2005), against the
general consensus in other countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon context, like
Canada, US, Australia and the UK (Carlino, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003, 2006;
Marinkovich Ravena & Mirán Ramírez, 1998).
Finally, the project was only approved as a University Program in a revised
version (Moyano and Natale, 2004) in 2005, after the three Institutes in charge

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of the Second Cycle of the diverse curricula joined to support and demand this
project, under the condition that it had to be evaluated during its rst applica-
tion. In consequence, PRODEAC is the rst Program of this kind in Argentina
with institutional nancial support necessary for its development.
e theoretical frame of this work is Genre & Register eory, developed by
Martin and the Sydney School in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and its peda-
gogical proposal (Martin & Rose, 2003, 2005, 2007; Eggins & Martin, 2001,
2003; Martin, 1993, 1999, 2000; Christie & Martin, 1997; Eggins, 1994;
Martin & Rothery, 1993; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Halliday & Martin, 1993),
adapted to our context and dierent educational levels in the course of research
during 2004-2005. (Moyano & Natale, 2004; Moyano, 2007).
PRODEAC proposes that the joint work between language professors and
professors in subject disciplines has central relevance in teaching academic/sci-
entic and work place literacy. It could be said that this kind of joint work can
guarantee the level of literacy development expected at the end of undergraduate
studies. However, this multidisciplinary practice only can take place under some
conditions:
(1) Language professors must have some specialization in scientic dis-
course and related linguistic and pedagogical theories.
(2) e scientic/academic and work place genres used need to be described
and taught.
(3) e pedagogy has to be oriented to the academic or professional contexts,
and must help students develop from heteronomy to autonomy.
(4) Disciplinary lecturers and linguists will work interdisciplinarily, shar-
ing knowledge to design pedagogical activities for teaching genres, the
teaching program, and evaluation and assessment.
is Program assumes that the students have to be introduced to common
practices in the eld by the expert members of the community. It allows, also,
the improvement of communication via interaction between experts, to enrich
the diversity of genres in the university. What’s more, the modeling of joint-
practice between experts of diverse disciplines could make a dierence in the
prole of graduating students who have the habit of working in inter or multi-
disciplinary groups to produce knowledge in co-operative work.
For achieving these goals, we have created the gure of an “assistant linguis-
tics professor” who has the role of accompanying the process of teaching literacy
inside the subjects. is means that the linguist has to (a) negotiate with lectur-
ers the genres they want students to produce; (b) intervene in classes teaching
students not only genres’ moves (Swales, 1990) or stages (Martin, 1992), but

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Negotiating Genre
also the most relevant resources of scientic discourse; and (c) encourage stu-
dents to deal with individual work, giving them the possibility of consulting in
individual sessions. e texts produced are marked by both the linguist and the
subject’s professor in charge of the subject. is collaborative process provides a
model for the specic subject’s professor, so that they can do this job alone af-
ter three semesters of intervention, with the possibility of ongoing consultation
with linguists.
en, PRODEAC has three pedagogical goals:
(1) To guide the improvement of students’ academic development through
teaching genres and their realisation through language in relation to
their activity as university fellows.
(2) To give assistance to specic subjects’ lecturers in planning, assigning
and evaluating written and oral tasks, in order to increase knowledge
construed by their students about the eld and academic and work place
practices.
(3) To increase specic subjects’ lecturers awareness of their disciplinary
genres and guide them in teaching these genres.
negotiating genres
Before interacting with students, the linguists have to deal with the dierent
levels of professors’ genre awareness. ey often lack consciousness about genres
as activity in the university or in working contexts, about genres as constitutive
of social action, and about the concept of language as a resource to construe real-
ity or technical or scientic knowledge.
e way we found to work with lecturers is called “negotiation.” By negotia-
tion we understand the discussion between linguists and professors about the
tasks they want to assign their students to write. ese texts—following Genre
& Register eory—are instantiations of a genre, so are social activities with a
clear purpose that members of a culture relate to another in a specic context
or situation. ese texts are developed by stages and phases which the students
have to recognize, as well as their realisation by language. So, the lecturers need
to be aware of these aspects of genre to formulate the assignments and to explain
the usefulness of genre awareness in learning the subject and the academic or
professional practice involved.
e negotiation begins with private encounters between the linguist and
the lecturer participating in the Program. ey talk about the subject and how
teaching and evaluation will be developed. en, they discuss the written or oral
texts the lecturer will assign to their students.
e negotiation can develop in dierent ways, depending on the lecturer’s
consciousness. Some professors have changed their teaching program and the

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way of evaluation as soon as they have been notied that are going to participate
in PRODEAC. Doing this, they show commitment with the Program. One of
them said:
Until the last semester, the evaluation of the regular course has
been done through two individual writing exams, based on a few
questions to answer. e student’s mark in the subject was based
on an oral examination, which consisted in an individual oral ex-
position about a special topic that integrates the contents of the
subject at the end of the course.
From the moment we started working with PRODEAC, this lecturer decided
to change the strategies of evaluation: he assigned a written exam to do at home,
a second one of the traditional type and a nal written work to do at home with
an oral defense. He expected to get written academic texts with characteristics
similar to professional or scientic ones. en, we could say he trusts in the ac-
tion of the Program to improve the literacy abilities of his students.
Other professors showed high expectations about the goals their students
could achieve, asking, as a nal work, for texts for presentation in academic
conferences or for publication. In this kind of work they expected the students
to write a “scientic essay,” using the course contents to solve a related issue.
It can be said, then, that some of the lecturers were very interested in the
Program at the moment we started to work with them. Sometimes, their ex-
pectations were too high for the rst time of application, but after several
interventions through the semesters with the same group of students, they
obtained some results that met those expectations.
exploring negotiation
In this part of this paper, I will try to show the process of negotiation with
dierent lecturers and to analyze their point of departure and their development
through the 2nd semester of 20065.
Case 1
In this rst case, the subject lecturer was a very experienced professor and
researcher who was assisted by two very young graduated fellows. ey wanted
the students to write an academic text similar to a research article, based in
eld experiences and incorporating technical and scientic concepts included
in literature. e rst activity consisted in reading some literature and writ-
ing resumès, which they could do well at this level of the curriculum. en,
the second assignment—designed by one of these young assistants—consisted

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Negotiating Genre
of determining, after observation, variables aecting an ecologic site and their
indicators. When the assistant linguist asked the professor what he thought the
students would write, he said “two lists linked by arrows.” e assistant linguist
didn’t contradict the proposal.
In most cases the students made two lists of elements linked by arrows. e
professors marked these resolutions with 7 points and appraised them very
much. ese products were evaluated considering only the content, such as
two lists of elements related “in some way” by the arrows. But, what did those
arrows mean? Why did they choose those variables and what did they mean?
ere was no explanation. e variables were well selected, as were the indica-
tors and the links between them. But they weren’t texts. Only a few students
tried to write an introduction.
en, the linguist suggested the professor ask students to transform this
kind of schemata into a full and cohesive text, which could be a “case analysis.”
For this purpose, the linguist asked for an article that instantiated this genre,
so that they could collaboratively analyze an example in order to identify the
schematic structure, the register and discourse-semantics and lexico-grammar
resources. But the professor couldn’t identify a good example: he brought dif-
ferent articles about the same topic, but none was an instantiation of a “case
analysis.” is means that he couldn’t recognize the genre, although this is
one of the most common in this research area. e linguist, then, outlined
by herself the schematic structure to show it to the subject’s professors, who
found it very adequate for the task. Finally, the linguist made the negotiation
of genre with the students, in a joint construction of the schematic structure
of the genre and the possibilities of choices the language system provides
in that context, unless the students were not aware of scientic language or
genres. As a result of these actions, they produced case analyses from 14 to 25
pages long, well enough written.
After this experience, during the second part of the subject course, the writ-
ten examination was prepared by the second young assistant. As she made a se-
quence of tasks to guide a short research, the linguist suggested that the students
could write a research article (RA). e subject professor suggested that the lin-
guist give the students another schemata, but the linguist proposed that students
themselves analyze an RA—oriented by the linguist herself —taking into ac-
count not only the schematic structure but also variables of register and some
discursive and grammatical resources. Without conviction, the lecturer agreed to
read with students a paper, which was jointly analyzed with active participation
of the three subject professors especially about the discipline’s conventions and
topics.
For the last week of the semester, the students completed texts from 8 to 17

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pages long. It’s very important to say that in the past the students have never pre-
sented the nal work on time, but this time they all did it. It’s necessary to say here
that one of the purposes of the Program is that students don’t delay the nal works,
because it delays their graduation too.
Case 2
In previous meetings, the subject professor of this case showed his teaching
program to the assistant linguist. Surprisingly, it included an uncommon assign-
ment: a publishable paper. It could mean that this lecturer had some previous
consciousness about the role of language in learning processes, or, at least, that
the students need to acquire some writing resources before nishing undergrad-
uate studies.
During the meetings, the linguist manifested worries about students’ lack of
enough information on the eld’s domain to write a publishable paper and their
lack of training in writing RAs. is clearly shows that she doubted that genres
may be learned without reection, by just being in contact with them—in co-
incidence with Sydney School (Martin & Rose, 2007)—and that giving them
brief instructions as in expert reviews is not enough to achieve the goal.
en, the agreement between the professor and the assistant linguist was
that they would do joint reading activities with the students and assign them a
resumè, before choosing RAs to make a joint analysis. In this case, the assistant’s
intervention in the subject was facilitated by the professor, who worked with
the linguist in joint analysis of the RA to help students in their approach to
the genre and their specic characteristics in the discipline. ey identied the
IMDC structure and the linguistic resources to construe meaning in this genre
as well as in multimodal forms: charts, maps and graphics. e students made
their texts with linguist and lecturer assistance taking one by one the phases rec-
ognized during the analysis and including multimodal resources. e students
had some diculties during the process, but nally wrote texts very close to the
genre, assisted by both the linguist and professor through email or consulting.
Finally, the professor suggested working with these students the next semester
in the co-relative subject. At the same time, he decided to include in the bibli-
ography of his teaching program more RAs to be read and analyzed by students
from the beginning of the next course.
Case 3
Some lecturers believe that they cannot require more than one written as-
signment each semester because more writing would not leave students enough
time to read the literature, which—they arm—is the most important task in
the course. However, in some cases writing is as important as reading, because

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through writing the students can relate concepts and apply them, as in a case
analysis or a project.
One of these lecturers planned to assign what he called “report of changes in
an enterprise.” When the linguist asked if the students would visit companies to
gather data for the report, the lecturer answered that they wouldn’t. en, the
assistant linguist suggested the students could better make a “project of change,”
if the professor gave them an example of a specic issue in context. en, the
lecturer understood the idea of the Program and accepted this change. He nego-
tiated with the linguist the genre, dening stages and phases, taking into account
his experience in this area of professional work. After that, both participants of
the negotiation prepared the task. e “project of change” should be a text pre-
sented by a professional for a specic purpose, e.g., a change in the production
system.
e process of negotiation was very dicult with the subject professor, who
didn’t trust in the capability of students to write this kind of text. e subject
professor and the linguist looked for models, but couldn’t nd any, except those
that have condential information. So, the negotiation was made by designing
the structure schemata:
preliminary genre design
Purpose of the text:
Suggesting to authorities of a Company a “Project for a Production Plan and
Control.”
Genre:
Project of Change in a Company
Hypothetical Participants:
(1) Writer: Industrial Engineer making a proposal.
(2) Readers: Company’s directors, professionals, mechanics and workers.
Information given to students:
Characteristics of an actual or hypothetical Company.
Problems faced by the Company in a specic time in its trajectory.
Schematic Structure:
(1) Company’s situational description at the moment of the Project presenta-
tion:
•What’s going wrong and why?

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•Recognizing and describing problems/diculties etc.
•Identifying possible causes.
•Identifying and describing possible present or future conse-
quential problems.
(2) Proposal of Change:
•What kind of changes could solve the identied problems?
•Proposing changes for solving problems.
•Anticipating benets those changes might produce.
After giving these schemata to students, the subject lecturer had to give some
orientation for them. So, he proposed working with the Just in Time system,
successfully applied in two actual companies. en, the linguist suggested asking
the students to dene and describe the Just in Time system from the literature
provided by the professor, which demanded changes in the rst schemata:
re-designing the genre
Genre:
Project of Change in a Company
Social space:
Company work place
Hypothetical Participants:
(1) Writer: Industrial Engineer making a proposal.
(2) Readers: Company’s directors, professionals, mechanics and employees.
Schematic Structure:
Introduction
•Anticipating the development of the text.
(1) Just in Time system
•What’s the Just in Time system?
•Denition with application samples.
(2) Proposal for interaction between Company’s sectors
•How might the interaction be between productive and commercial
sectors?
•Factorial explanations and procedures.

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Negotiating Genre
(3) Benets of applying the Just in Time system
•Why will this system benefit the Company?
•Exposition. e student has to mention the benets and dis-
advantages.
Conclusion
•Synthesis.
During the genre presentation class, the linguist explained the schematic
structure and resources of discourse and dierent genres involved. e subject
professor collaborated giving contextual information: the internal communica-
tion’s relevance in a company, its style, the kind of relationship between the
interactants, etc. is was a very useful resource for students. Although they de-
layed the presentation of the nal text, at the end of the course after lot of work
with the linguist in private encounters, they made proper texts.
Case 4
In another case, a professor assigned a “literature report” not giving time for
negotiation with the linguist, nor between the linguist and the students. e
students made separate resumès of each text, and the lecturer accepted these
resumès as though they completed the task correctly. e linguist expressed the
view that the genre was not realised, and the lecturer answered she didn’t know
indeed what a “literature report” was, that she had heard the name and decided
to assign it to the students.
is was just one example of a professor’s lack of commitment to the class
and the university during two semesters’ work. After that, this professor left the
university, which might explain her lack of engagement, but we do not know
this for certain.
is lecturer’s lack of commitment was a negative inuence for students, who
didn’t engage with the Program during this time. In other subjects involving
PRODEAC, the more engaged the lecturer was, the more the students were en-
gaged. However, if the students showed too much resistance, the lecturers were
more reluctant to negotiate.
It is in this kind of situation that institutional support is very much needed.
e university’s strong commitment—in this case of the Instituto de Indu-
stria—led this conict to a good ending: lecturers had to negotiate and students
had to accept their participation in the Program.
Case 5
We will refer now to another subject professor, who gradually understood the

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Program during her participation. Before starting, she was already enthusiastic
about giving written activities to her students. ese activities were proposed
for closing units of the teaching program, to help students think about the con-
cepts of the subject and to evaluate learning. She called these activities “fresh” or
“spontaneous” writing, “not being exemplars of a genre.”
e rst step for negotiation was to make a diagnosis, asking students to
make a resumè of a text from the literature given. Both the professor and the
linguist marked these texts and found that the students could accomplish this
activity very well, as they were used to writing them in the First Cycle of the cur-
riculum. Problems in writing emerge when the professors assign the students to
write a literature report or a more complex text.
e second activity in this rst edition of the joint work was to expose briey
some concepts about tensions in economics and politics during the 70s, apply-
ing them especially to the Argentinean case. e subject professor didn’t want
to analyze a text of this kind, so the linguist tried to recover the experience in
literacy the students had had in a previous course they took prior to their stud-
ies as university fellows. e linguist proposed a kind of schemata for the text
to be elaborated. e results were not as the professor expected, so the linguist
negotiated to do a joint-editing work in the class, to explain to the students the
common diculties they had with the assignment.
e third task was dened as a “case analysis.” e students had to take from
newspapers a case related to concepts in the literature and analyze it in a “proper
way,” with students developing criteria for applying concepts from the literature.
e linguist suggested it was very dicult for students to develop their own cri-
teria at the 6th semester of the curriculum, because they were never asked to do
a similar task in the First Cycle. So, they needed some guide to develop a critical
view of the literature and how to relate it to a case.
As the subject professor didn’t provide a text for analysis and as she saw that
the results of the rst case analysis weren’t as expected, she agreed to work with
the linguist to develop a schematic structure of the genre and help the students
to develop the criteria for literature application. In her class, the linguist made
special emphasis on the plan for the text and the students had to present their
plans to the group for discussion. Only after that they were allowed to write the
text. e results were better than before, so the subject professor accepted the
need to dene the genre, describe it and guide the production at this level.
During the second application, in 2006, the subject professor was more open
to the linguist’s suggestions. She changed the teaching program, enlightened by
the rst experience, and had better results.
It’s relevant to say that she gave support to PRODEAC in front of the stu-
dents, so they were increasing their participation in classes and working harder
with their texts. We can say, again, that this support is very important for the

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Negotiating Genre
developing of the Program. As was said before, when the professor is engaged,
the students are too. For every assignment of the second edition of this experi-
ence, the professor had a clear idea of the genre she was asking for. e students
not only understood what genre they had to produce but also how to construe
criteria for analyzing the case. So, both professors advanced in the description of
genres, taking into account its schematic structure, register, discourse-semantics
and lexico-grammar patterns.
Case 6
e process of negotiation with an economics professor will be analyzed now.
At the beginning of the intervention, the professor said that natural language
doesn’t intervene in teaching this subject: he projected on the board some charts
with economic data and selected some numbers to put into relation for making
conclusions with the students. So, he agreed to participate in the Program with
the idea that “he hasn’t anything to oer to it.” As can be seen in this assertion,
the subject professor thought that he had to give something to the Program, in-
stead of seeing it as a multidisciplinary activity which would aect the learning
of his subject and the specialized literacy development of students.
e assistant linguist decided to be present in his classes just to observe them,
and, after some, showed to the subject professor in private that he in fact used
natural language to construe meaning from the related data of the chart. Finally,
at the end of the semester, the lecturer understood how language functions in in-
terpreting data to make conclusions. en, he looked for some reports from the
Center of Studies for Latin America (CEPAL) for analysis, and then the students
produced a brief report as a nal work for the course. It’s important to say that
this is one of the last subjects the students have to complete before graduation as
economists, so they need to learn how to write professional genres.
In the second semester this professor worked with PRODEAC, he modied
the teaching program, including activities of joint analysis to show how the
expert writers use the economic data of charts to construe their texts as exposi-
tions, as the students will have to do as professionals. en, the students wrote
their own texts; the linguist could do the joint editing of one of them, and the
students wrote another text of this kind as a nal evaluation in the subject.
Case 7
e last case I will take for this paper is a subject from the Industrial En-
gineering curriculum, where the students must design an industrial product,
justify its need for the society and make the product itself as a prototype. e ne-
gotiation with the lecturers in charge was very dicult, because they understood
that they needed to change the goals of the subject to work with PRODEAC.

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e assistant linguist made an eort to do this negotiation, and it was dicult,
as she needed the assistance of the director of the Program.
First, she asked the lecturers if the students had to write any texts during the
semester, and they said that students had to write weekly progress reports. After
arguing that these texts varied greatly, the professors provided last semester’s
progress reports so that the linguist could study them.
After studying the texts, the assistant linguist proposed a complex schematic
structure of the genre, because—as a macro-genre—it includes dierent types of
texts: one to tell how the idea was generated; a second one to justify the need of
the product in the market; a third one to describe the product and the materi-
als used for making it. For designing the schematic structure of the genre, the
linguist took into account the forms that professionals have to ll in to request
nances for innovative projects in competitions organized by the government or
companies. Finally, the linguist had to include in the schematic structure some
elements asked for by the subject professors in order to evaluate the performance
of students in the activity. e genre was called “designing a product project.”
When the negotiation reached an agreement between the lecturers involved,
the linguist had the opportunity to intervene in some classes to describe the
genre and give some instructions to write it. In this case, the joint evaluation
had the most relevant function, because it helped the students to work with their
texts through nal revisions.
Finally, the students were interested in oral presentations of the products,
which required the linguist to teach how to make a Power Point presentation
and how to give a talk supported by this resource. In this task, the academic
evaluative aspects of the genre were removed, turning it into a professional one
labeled “proposal of a new product.” e presentations were made to the pub-
lic—students and engineers who teach at the university—and were very well
received.
is case was very interesting, because it represented a hard challenge: how to
obtain an understanding about the genre within real material and social activity.
e professors themselves increased their understanding and now ask assistance
from linguists to make their own presentations to government or commercial
competitions.
lecturer’s evolution
To sum up, at the beginning of the Program, we have detected in the sub-
jects’ lecturers three degrees of awareness of the role of language in knowledge
construction (Vigotsky, 1978) and the value of the conceptualization of genres
as social activities (Martin, 1984):

457
Negotiating Genre
(1) e rst group appreciates language practices in science and
recognizes some scientic genres, but doesn’t have pedagogical
resources to teach them. In general, they are experienced writers
and researchers who have also guided post-graduate theses, so their
consciousness about academic and working practices is high.
Negotiating with this group is not very dicult: the professors
allow the linguist to assist the students through joint analyses of
academic genres and/or joint editing of their texts. In cases in
which it was not possible to nd a text for analysis, the linguist
made a schemata with students (based on previous consensus with
the professors), to guide the production. is group of lecturers
participate in the linguist’s classes, making comments and explain-
ing matters about the discipline and the way to make decisions
about what kind of contents should be included in the texts and
why. When the students have written their texts, the linguist, the
lecturer and the students jointly revise one or two texts written by
the students. Sometimes, this is the rst text they have produced
in the genre, so the next activity could be to produce the same
genre about another topic as nal evaluation. e linguists make
suggestions to the students about possible solutions to the pro-
posed task, or about what else might be needed in the nal, more
complex assignment.
e negotiation includes discussion of dierent points of view
between linguists and lecturers, but in most cases they gradually
agree. In these cases, for the second experience, the lecturers in-
cluded in their teaching programs’ literature texts to analyze and
to make genres familiar to their students.
(2) e second group also appreciates language practices, but
doesn’t know clearly how they could help their students to learn
better the subject’s concepts nor what kind of texts they might as-
sign students for achieving this purpose. ey are not aware about
the concept of genre, although they know the more complex ones
which they, as academics or professionals, are used to writing.
is group is indeed the most dicult to work with. At the be-
ginning, some lecturers were not very interested in our proposal
because they thought that we were going to put the emphasis on
norms and “beautiful writing.” ey presented some resistance
but some of them (not all mentioned here) have grown in under-

Moyano
458
standing of the purpose of the Program after the rst application.
As we have shown, some of them didn’t collaborate at all. In one
case, after the rst participation, the professor decided to give up
the Program. But one year later she asked to rejoin it because she
found that the students produced better texts and learned the sub-
ject better when she worked with PRODEAC. At this moment,
we are working again with her.
(3) e third group hasn’t any awareness of the role of natural
language in knowledge construction, whether they consider that
“numbers speak on their own”—as some economists said—or,
as some engineers said, they only teach “activity” or “how to do
things” in professional life. But, after seeing the results, they appre-
ciate the Program and propose other ways to work, like producing
materials for students to reinforce what is done in classes. is is
a job in progress now, and it will be extended to other subjects,
through writing a book which will describe the genres used more
frequently.
It is necessary to say that the evolution of the lecturers involved in the Pro-
gram is not as fast as it looks in this presentation. It requires slow and subtle
work from the linguist, since the proposal is not clearly understood from the be-
ginning. Some of the professors feel the process is invasive, and put up barriers,
avoiding encounters or being absent in the linguist’s classes. But after a period of
interaction, things change: the lecturers start to see how the Program can help
the teaching-learning process and the help it gives to the students’ texts for their
university and future professional lives.
conclusion
To sum up, the negotiation consists in guiding the lecturers to dene clearly,
in interaction with the assistant linguist, genres the students need to learn. ey
make explicit for each genre the stages and phases, and the linguists help them
to be conscious about the kind of language that realise the meanings each genre
construes, the kind of relationship between interactants in the text and its reali-
sation, the organization of these meanings in a text, and the information ow
as well as the function of multimodality, sometimes represented by the use of
charts, schemata, graphics, maps, etc.
In consequence, the lecturers acquire consciousness of genre, generally in the
second time participating in the Program, when they work positively from the
rst moment and make proposals as alternatives. ey also grow in comprehen-

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Negotiating Genre
sion of the possibility of teaching genres and take the habit of working in this
way, recognizing that the students’ productions show deeper reection about
theoretical contents and their application.
Now we reach the moment to discuss if this negotiation procedure is theoret-
ically acceptable. It is supposed that the members of a community share genres
that achieve their own communicative purpose (Swales, 1990), or that in each
area of activity the speakers-listeners know genres as they know the system of
language (Bakhtin, 1952-53). e fact is that in the academy this is not auto-
matic, as we try to show through the cases analyzed before. So, in the theoretical
frame we have chosen (Sydney School’s G&R eory), it is possible to say that
a linguist can increase the awareness about genres of the members of a certain
social activity institution in a culture. Negotiation seems to be an adequate pro-
cedure for this purpose, as is shown in this paper.
e work of the linguist is, as Martin and Rose (2007) said, to detect genres,
describe them in all the strata of language and context and label them. In the case
of academic and workplace genres, the experience with the subject professors is
very useful. ey are not aware of this necessity but increase in comprehension
and collaboration as they work with the associated linguist of the Program.
About the legitimacy of this practice I can say that almost all the university
community has shown interest in this Program to accomplish the foundational
purposes of the university. e professors increase their awareness about the
importance of genre to teach academic literacy, and the role of language in con-
struing knowledge. e students improve their skills in academic literacy and
can manage better the concepts of the dierent subjects they study. Genres are
negotiated from the perspective of professional and academic activities in each
eld, the interpersonal relationships and the role language plays in the process of
writing and learning.
Of course, there are many things to do in order to realize the Program and its
impact, but we are still starting this process: in 2005 we worked in six subjects
and in the second semester of 2007 we are covering 20 with more success than
before. Now professors and students ask to participate in PRODEAC, so we try
to cover their requests in dierent ways.
I have to remark, nally, on the importance of institutional support, not only
nancial but also the administrative determination to expand the application of
the Program. It’s important to say that the University is helping to form a stable
group of linguists to carry out the work, creating posts for this purpose and giv-
ing support for publications or other means to increase students’ and subject
professors’ interest in participating.
During the last months of 2007, UNGS is extending the Program to provide
linguists to work with advanced students who are writing grant proposals and

Moyano
460
making presentations of their research. is means one step forward and a new
challenge to expand PRODEAC.
notes
1 I want to thank especially Dr. Charles Bazerman for his patient reading and
his valuable help.
2 e Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento is located in the 2º Cordón
del Conurbano Bonaerense, “the second line of Buenos Aires suburbs.” e main
population comes from disadvantaged schools and workers’ families, so in terms
of Bernstein, they have restricted codes.
3 e use of language has been seen as a relevant practice in our University
since its foundation (Coraggio, 1994).
4 is doesn’t mean that we don’t think that this Program should be applied
all across the curriculum, including the First Cycle, but political issues didn’t al-
low us to do a complete design.
5 ese dierent cases recount the experiences of linguists working as assis-
tant professors: Lucía Natale, Silvia Mateo, Elena Valente and Oscar Amaya.
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