Genre Analysis in Applied Linguistics: A Critical Review and Integrative Perspective

Abstract

This article examines three traditions that have shaped genre analysis in applied linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), and the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach. SFL treats genre as a staged social process realized through language choices. RGS treats it as social action situated inside a discourse community. ESP treats it as a communicative event built from recognizable rhetorical moves. Rather than cataloguing these three views side by side, as earlier reviews have tended to do, this article traces where recent scholarship has pushed the traditions closer together: corpus assisted genre analysis, multimodal and video genres, the politics of who gets to publish in English, and the arrival of generative AI as a genre producing tool have forced the three camps to borrow from one another whether they intended to or not. Building on that comparative work, the article proposes and operationalizes an integrative framework that treats genre simultaneously as a linguistic pattern, a rhetorical strategy, and a social action, and it names the empirical weaknesses each tradition still carries into that synthesis. It closes with implications for research and for the genre classroom.