21 Genre and Disciplinary Work in French Didactics Research

introduction How genre is understood and configured in analyses of disciplinary texts and discourses is key to understanding the nature of student work in the disciplines. The question of genre is also intimately linked to what we know about expert texts in a discipline. These relationships have been studied for some time in France, first through traditional-formalist frames of text types and modes, more recently through understandings of genre in social, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. Proponents of both traditional and newer perspectives appear to agree on the usefulness of genre when researchers seek to classify texts to be studied, but take fundamentally different stances (“radical reconfigurations,” to use the terms of Coe, Lingard and Teslenko, 2002) towards how that classification might be done, as well as what the relationships are among groups of texts, single texts, and the social and political situations in which textual production and reception are carried out. Currently, many of the French genre theorists in the field of la didactique de l’écrit (the field of discipline-based theory about the teaching and learning of writing) systematically explore disciplines and genres in higher education, using the frames of theories of didactic-disciplinary universes of writing, discourse communities, or generic reception theory. I will offer here a partial review of some of the more innovative paths being taken, showing how perspectives about genre have been evolving in both complementary and divergent ways as scholars explore the complex set of elements that make “genre” a usable research tool for studying students’ writing in the disciplines. A current higher education research project in France, a first-of-its-kind study of students’ writing and learning practices in four disciplines at three universities, will serve to highlight some of the ways in which current, complex notions of genre are being fruitfully brought into play in the study of student writing across disciplines.