ES género discursivo / CAT gènere discursiu / FR genre discursif / DE Textsort

From a sociocultural point of view, discourse genres are defined as social and historical linguistic products that meet their users’ social and professional needs. Therefore, to be discursively competent means being able to tackle discourse genres (such as a motivational letter, an online comment, an informal conversation, etc.) not only as a cognitive act (generating ideas, planning, formulating hypotheses, coding or decoding, inferring, etc.), but also as a social practice which will involve assuming roles, showing identities, interacting, persuading, exerting power or control. Genres are mainly defined through their sociocultural and pragmatic characteristics, as “situated” forms of cognition within specific social activities.

Discourse genres, therefore, take place in the social practices that characterize them: for instance, the discourse genre “discussion” is a different social practice depending on the situational or cultural parameters, the relations between the interlocutors, the identities implied, etc. Thus, in order to describe a genre, its different characteristics must be analyzed in their different dimensions, including the sociocultural dimension or overall context of the culture where it belongs, the pragmatic dimension or immediate context, and the textual dimension (both structural and linguistic).

To be competent in a language means knowing and being able to identify the meaning and function of the discourse genres pertaining to each sociocultural context to be able to participate effectively in culturally valued events and to mix with other people. An action-oriented approach regards language learning precisely as the development of mastery of the largest unit of communication: the text in relation to the genre colony to which it belongs.

References

• Bajtín, Mijaíl (1979). El problema de los géneros discursivos. En M. Bajtín, Estética de la creación verbal, 248-293. México: Siglo XXI. 
• Berkenkotter, Carol y Huckin, Thomas N. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale (Nueva Jersey): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
• Swales, John (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP.