Approaching genres as knowledge structures provides a useful theoretical basis for
teaching students to communicate across cultures. The approach is based on the
concept of schemata (Rumelhart, 1980; Cook, 1994) and on Swales's (1990)
techniques for genre analysis. It is divided into four interrelated teaching stages:
background information, communicative purposes, text structure, and the implica
tions of genre comparisons. Among the four stages, teaching the communicative
purposes is the most important. This approach has been used effectively to teach
students how to write sales letters in English and Chinese.
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