In Sections I and II of this book, we considered general issues regarding

Variation in genre
As we saw in Chapter 4, genres belong to discourse communities and arise 
to carry out the purposes of those communities. Thus in educational con-
texts we expect a textbook to be a long text divided into chapters which 
contain explanations and examples, while a handout is likely to be a short 
text consisting of several paragraphs with information in bullet points. In 
order to decide which genre these texts belong to, we activate our knowl-
edge of the way in which teachers generally achieve two different purposes: 
the textbook gives extensive explanations, while the handout supplies a set 
of notes. Thus in very general terms, genre can be thought of as combining 
register with purpose. For a text to be successful, it needs to be consistent 
in both register and genre. It would be inappropriate if a textbook writer 
addressed the reader as ‘darling’, since this would be inconsistent in terms 
of register, specifically tenor. Nor would we expect it to include a chapter 
containing greetings to the reader, as this move belongs to conversational 
genres and would make the text inconsistent in terms of genre.
As genres carry out different purposes within their discourse communities, 
their language features differ as well. One important distinction is between 
expert and learner genres, which we can illustrate by contrasting the RA 
with the doctoral thesis. Although these two genres may seem similar, they 
have different purposes and audiences and it is these that drive the discour-
sal differences. As we saw in the Reflection, the RA is written by an expert 
to fellow experts and is designed to transmit new research knowledge. The 
doctoral thesis, however, has both fellow experts and examiners as readers 
and must therefore convey new research knowledge, while also displaying 
extensive mastery of the field. This leads to greater attention being paid to 
the literature review, since this is a key site for displaying the writer’s in-
depth disciplinary knowledge (Swales, 2004).

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96 Teaching and assessing EAP
Variation according to genre has important implications for the choice of 
texts and their use in the EAP class. Thus an expert genre like the RA is not 
necessarily suitable for teaching writing to undergraduates, since students at 
this level are not normally required to present new knowledge to the disci-