Genre analysis: The state of the art (An online interview with Vijay Kumar Bhatia)

In this interview, Vijay Bhatia freely reflects on his personal experiences, perceptions, and views about the development of Genre Analysis in the early eighties towards Critical Genre Analysis today. He offers his impressions about how professionals construct, interpret, use and often exploit generic resources in their everyday practice to meet their professional objectives in specific contexts. Starting from the early conceptualization of Genre in the eighties in the United Kingdom, he points out how it was essentially inspired by the everyday concerns about the teaching and learning of English for Specific Purposes, and how it continued to gain popularity and is considered one of the most popular frameworks for ESP applications in the present-day context. However, he points out, it is not enough to analyze and describe just the specialist discourses; it is also equally important to understand how such discourses are employed in professional practice to meet specific requirements of a particular profession. Hence the need to develop traditional Genre Analytical framework further towards what he calls Critical Genre Analysis to demystify interdiscursive performance in specific academic and professional settings. Adapted from source document