Genre theories and perspectives for teaching: a brief illustrated panorama

Abstract

A criticism on genre-based teaching concerns its character of simulation. Genre, when transformed into a teaching subject, effectively ceases to function as genre in a real social situation. This understanding questions the validity of explicit pedagogical approaches, which their focus on genre based on structural models that usually emphasize linguistic and organizational aspects of texts linked to specific genres. The question is how to maintain the notion of genre as social action if its insertion in the classroom implies its withdrawal from the real context of production, circulation and reception. Thus, the aim of this work is to reflect on how different theoretical approaches to genre and, in particular, the perspective of Rhetorical Genre Studies, offer subsidies for teaching that do not reduce genre to a simple formal structure, but that preserve its functional, communicative and rhetorical aspects. The discussion is illustrated with references to researches that were conducted in the Professional Master's Program in Letters (PROFLETRAS) guided by a search of an approach that is meaningful in the classroom and at the same time maintains the relationship of genre and its real context of occurrence.