Géneros de intercambio virtual: ¿qué nos pueden informar las teorías de género sobre la primera sesión sincrónica?

Genre Studies in the New Rhetoric and ESP Perspectives

In her seminal work, Miller (1984) highlights the connection between genre and recurrent situations. Genre is used to refer to rhetorical responses to situational demands, which become comparable as the responses start being used in similar situations through the typifications of the rhetorical action (Miller, 1984).

Genres are rhetorical categories of social action, they are culturally dependent, and assist in shaping the rhetorical experiences of communities (Miller, 1994, 2015). As explained by Miller, Devitt, and Gallagher (2018), because they are used as part of collective experience, genres allow us to capture large-scale patterns of symbolic interactions and encompass individual intentions and social exigencies.

Sharing the assumption that discourse is both “socially situated and designed to achieve rhetorical goals” (Swales, 1990, p. 5), Swales presents his understanding of the concepts of genre and community. The author, renowned for his contributions to English for Specific Purposes, argues that genres are a class of communicative events that typically possess features of stability and are employed by a discourse community to achieve their shared communicative purposes. At the time, the concept of communicative purpose was the privileged criterion for the identification of a genre, which was later revised (Askehave & Swales, 2001). According to Askehave and Swales (2001), the concept of communicative purpose is still a relevant one, however, the analyst should submit the genre to a “repurposing” process after observing the context in which it occurs, its structure, style, and content.

In terms of genre analysis, Swales’ (1990) contribution is the proposition of a model, CARS - Create a Research Space, which comprises the prototypical structure of research article introductions. While the model has been criticized over the years for the uncertainty of moves identification and analysis replication (Moreno & Swales, 2018), it has also led to the creation of new models and successful application to the investigation of a variety of academic and non-academic genres (Swales, 2009; Aull and Swales, 2015). Swales (1990) proposes that genres are organized in patterns of action, namely rhetorical moves. The author defines a rhetorical move as a “discoursal or rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function (…) (which is) flexible in terms of its linguistic realization. (…) It is a functional, not formal, unit” (Swales, 2004, p. 228-229). Reiterating this, it is not a set of words or expressions that determine a move, but, instead, its function or the purpose it aims at achieving. A move, then, may be realized differently in diverse texts, provided that it aims at accomplishing the same rhetorical function.

Additionally, a rhetorical move may be seen as a content-based unit (Paltridge, 1994; Aranha, 1996), which means that the boundaries between moves are drawn essentially on categories based on content. More recently, Moreno and Swales (2018) discuss the concept of rhetorical move, emphasizing that it is a rhetorical construct whose linguistic realization is flexible. The authors argue that rhetorical moves are realized by the presence of one or more specific functions (steps), and their boundaries may be uncertain.

Based on the aforementioned authors, it may be said that when a community perceives a situation as similar to others, they start applying certain forms of action that were successful before to reach their purposes - the genres. Despite being an abstract concept, genres are realized through texts, which are organized in rhetorical patterns of actions. In other words, a portion of text - which may vary from a sentence to one or more paragraphs- fulfils certain rhetorical functions. These portions of text are named by Swales (1990) as rhetorical moves, and texts belonging to the same genre will display the same rhetorical moves, with some variation depending on the genre. Such concepts have been employed in the discussion of virtual exchange genres that occur within the institutional integrated Teletandem.

Institutional Integrated Teletandem

Based on tandem learning (see Tardieu & Horgues, 2019), Teletandem promotes autonomous language and cultural learning. It has been successfully run at São Paulo State University (Telles and Vassallo, 2006; Benedetti, Consolo & Vieira-Abrahão, 2010; Aranha & Cavalari, 2014; Silva & Salomão, 2022), and has exceeded the boundaries of its birth institution and is currently offered at other Brazilian universities (Cavalari, 2018; Lopes, Queiroz & Fernandes, 2022; Author, forthcoming) in partnership with institutions abroad.

In Teletandem, learners tend to meet regularly in Teletandem Oral Sessions - the virtual encounter. Following tandem organization (Brammerts, 2002), Teletandem may be carried out in different modalities (see Aranha and Cavalari, 2014; Cavalari, 2018), one of which is the institutional integrated Teletandem (iiTTD). iiTTD is promoted by two partner institutions and is fully integrated into the language courses in which participants are enrolled.

The characteristics of iiTTD are thoroughly described by Aranha and Cavalari (2014), who explain participation is mandatory for students. Because it is offered as part of a discipline, learners are also assessed for their participation and are required complete a series of interrelated tasks (Aranha & Cavalari, 2014; Cavalari & Aranha, 2019).

Typically, learners involved in iiTTD are expected to accomplish the following tasks: attend an orientation or tutoring session - similar to Gutiérrez et al. (2002) description of the pre-mentoring phase of VE;²engage in Teletandem oral sessions; exchange texts written in the target language to be revised/corrected by their partners; write reflective diary entries after each Teletandem oral session; participate in mediation sessions - group reflection moments led by the teacher-mediator; and complete questionnaires (Aranha & Cavalari, 2014).

Teletandem has also been described, by Aranha and Leone (2017), as a complex learning environment in which the macro and microtasks that are proposed and realized are organized in pedagogical scenarios that vary according to the needs and characteristics of each Teletandem partnership. According to the authors, the planned Teletandem pedagogical scenario actualizes itself into a learning scenario when put into practice. The learning scenario concept describes the Teletandem modality, the institutions involved, students’ sociodemographic profiles, professors and mediators involved, accomplished tasks, duration, and the number of sessions (Aranha & Leone, 2017).

Previous research suggested that, for each Teletandem group and semester, a new learning scenario is formed (Rampazzo, 2017; Rampazzo and Aranha, 2018; Lopes, 2019; Aranha and Wigham, 2020). The characteristics of a given learning scenario may have an impact on how learners engage and interact with each other (Rampazzo, 2017), which may, in turn, result in a different rhetorical structure for the genres that emerge in the context. In other words, depending on the scenario, the realization of a given genre may be slightly distinct.

Teletandem Genres

The first account of Teletandem genres comes from Aranha’s (2014) proposal that the interactions that occur in iiTTD are repeated rhetorical situations. The author bases her argumentation on the understanding that those involved in Teletandem form a community, the Teletandem Community (Silva, 2012; Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019a), whose members share common goals and are expected to use genres to achieve such objectives.

Regarding the tasks, Aranha (2014) argues that they are recurrent and typical and allow for the development and use of a variety of genres. To test such a hypothesis, she analyzed the initial 15 minutes of the initial Teletandem Oral Session (iTOS) and identified that learners acted in similar manners as they tried to establish and maintain contact.

Later, expanding on Aranha’s (2014) study, the Author also investigated the first 15 minutes of iTOS from a different sample. Their data were composed of ten sessions from two learning scenarios of the same Teletandem modality. In one scenario, there was a previous pairing and learners first contacted each other asynchronously in a text exchange in their target language. Conversely, the first contact between dyads in the other scenario was during iTOS, and there was no preceding text exchange.

Corroborating Aranha’s (2014) results, the author and others argue that the initial 15 minutes of iTOS is organized in different rhetorical moves, in which learners (i) exchange information and (ii) negotiate. A third move, (iii) text discussion, occurs when learners are required to exchange texts in the target language before iTOS. Based on the findings, the authors state that the prototypical structure of iTOS “may vary according to the peculiarities of the learning scenario” (Rampazzo, 2017), at least in the initial 15 minutes.

After that, other studies concentrated on iTOS from a genre perspective: Rampazzo discussed it as an occluded genre based on Swales (1996) and Loudermilk (2007), and Aranha and Rampazzo (2022) explored the concept of negotiation in telecollaboration. Rampazzo (2019) argues that because iTOS is not a public genre, learners need to rely on other genres and previous experiences to co-construct iTOS, which may lead to a more flexible genre structure, as the genre repertoire may vary from person to person.

Considering the studies of iTOS, it may be argued that participants follow similar communication patterns, even though there is some flexibility in how it is materialized (Author). Such a flexible structure seems to be constitutive of the genre, but it is important to note that only the initial 15 minutes have been studied. Therefore, it is relevant to examine iTOS in its full length to determine whether the distinctions in its structure are prevalent after the 15 minutes have been completed.

Nevertheless, because of iTOS’s seemingly malleable characteristics, in this paper, I opt for using the term rhetorical action to describe the rhetorical patterns of iTOS instead of rhetorical moves. The proposition is motivated by the fact that the term ‘move’ has been extensively used to describe genres with formulaic structure, i.e., in such genres, moves tend to occur in a fixed order and with more specific functions (Aull & Swales, 2000; Moreno & Swales, 2018). Additionally, Swales’ (1990) intent was that the identification of moves served the purpose of offering models to students who wanted to initiate into a community. Although the results of this study may help illustrate what to expect from VE contexts, the aim of this research is not to offer a model. The choice of the expression rhetorical action points to a more fluid concept and is more adequate to the VE environment in which iTOS occurs.

Conversely, the identification of a rhetorical action follows the same procedures used to determine rhetorical moves, i.e., the analyst reads through the text and identifies the parts that aim to accomplish a rhetorical function realized through certain content. On the other hand, given that the option for the term rhetorical action points to a more fluid concept, it is important to note that the distinction of steps within actions is not pertinent here. This is because previous studies also suggest that there is more flexibility in their realization and that it is complex to determine very specific functions and boundaries within larger portions of text (Rampazzo & Aranha, 2018, 2019b).

MulTeC

The corpus analyzed in this study was retrieved from MulTeC (Multimodal Teletandem Corpus) (Aranha & Lopes, 2019), a multimodal and bilingual learner corpus (Lopes, 2019, Aranha & Wigham, 2021). It includes data and metadata generated from Teletandem partnerships between São Paulo State University in Brazil and University of Georgia in the United States from 2012 to 2015. It includes data generated from institutional integrated and semi-integrated Teletandem modalities, resulting in a total of 581 hours of recordings of Teletandem Oral Sessions and 351 chat registers, produced by both learners from Brazil and the US, and additional texts produced by Brazilians only, such as 666 learning diaries, 956 texts written in the target language, and 132 questionnaires.

Data and Participants

Primary data for this investigation consist of ten recordings of ten iTOS: three from 2012, two from 2013, three from 2014, and two from 2015. The selection criteria were: (i) all iTOS were from the institutional integrated modality; (ii) the session from the same year was requited to integrate the same learning scenario. The option for iTOS from different scenarios follows previous studies (Rampazzo & Aranha, 2018, 2019b) and is consistent with the aim of identifying the extent to which the rhetorical patterns are related to the context specificities.

For didactic purposes, this paper adopts the nomenclature iTOS-1, iTOS-2… to describe the sessions. The transcribed sessions resulted in 46,604 words. Following the methodology outlined by the author, sessions were grouped into three scenarios as illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1: Learning Scenarios Descriptions

Source: The author, based on information available in MulTeC

In Learning Scenario A, dyads did not know beforehand who they would meet and had not engaged in asynchronous communication before iTOS. In Scenarios B and C, however, learners had received their partners’ contact information in advance. In Scenario B, the learner in the American university was supposed to write a text in Portuguese to be sent to their partner, who would revise and comment on it during iTOS. In Scenario C, learners were told to exchange emails in the target language to introduce themselves. During iTOS, they were expected to revise each other’s emails.

In regard to the participants, their information is presented in Table 2, which includes their phenotypic sex and institution, majors, and self-assessed proficiency level in the target language based on CEFR descriptors.³

Table 2: Participants information

Source: The author, based on information available in MulTeC

All Brazilian participants were majoring in Languages and were, at least, independent users of English. In iTOS-3 and iTOS-10, learners in the us acted as substitutes for the original partners. Most learners were in their early twenties.

Analysis Procedures

This qualitative study involves the analysis of textual, non-numerical data through genre analysis procedures. To answer the first question, “What are the recurrent rhetorical patterns of iTOS?”, the rhetorical actions were identified based on their functions. Following the approach of Moreno and Swales’ (2018), the transcripts were manually analyzed. The argumentative parts were segmented and labeled as a rhetorical action.

Initially, the analysis considered the rhetorical actions previously suggested by Rampazzo in her analysis of the first 15 minutes, namely, information exchange, negotiation, and text discussion. The observation of the data, however, motivated the recognition of two additional actions: introductions and saying goodbye. A second analyst, also a member of the Teletandem community, observed 20% of the data to establish the reliability of the research (O’Connor & Joffe, 2020). The analysis categories were discussed and the results were compared. The agreement rate was approximately 86%. The disagreements were discussed and resolved.

The discussion led to a revision of the rhetorical action of introduction and inclusion of an action of greetings. The analysis, then, considered six rhetorical actions in iTOS: greetings, introduction, negtiation, information exchange, text discussion, and saying goodbye. Given that the concept of rhetorical action is fluid and boundaries are imprecise, certain portions of text may fulfil more than one function. When that is the case, the rhetorical actions are integrated into one another.

Besides identifying the rhetorical actions in iTOS, the analysis considered the number of words through the tool Word Count from Microsoft Word. In addition, using the Elmedia Video Player, the number of minutes participants dispensed in each rhetorical action was calculated. Such numerical counting provides a more general vision of the rhetorical patterns in iTOS and indicates the actions that are more or less relevant to participants.

Finally, to answer how rhetorical patterns relate to the characteristics of the context, the learning scenarios were reconstituted (Table 1). After identifying the specificities of each scenario, correlations were established between the scenarios and iTOS materialization in terms of rhetorical actions.

Greetings and Introductions

In previous research, Rampazzo and Aranha (2018), 2019b), who had analyzed the first 15 minutes of iTOS only, had placed greetings and introductions within the rhetorical action of information exchange. Nevertheless, the analysis of the data for this research revealed that greetings typical of salutation and name exchange correspond to actions localized at the macrostructural level, that is, they are not simply an information exchange action, but, instead, function as an opening to the conversation.

Even though they fulfil different functions, greetings and introductions are presented in the same section because they tend to be imbricated into one another (Excerpt 1).⁴ Such amalgamation occurs in seven iTOS (iTOS-1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10).

Information Exchange

Corroborating previous studies on the first 15 minutes of iTOS (Author), in this research corpus, composed of iTOS in their full length, information exchange also represents the action in which participants spend the most time - an average of 33 minutes per iTOS. During the tutoring session, participants are advised to dedicate time to getting to know each other, so it is expected that they talk about themselves and their preferences.

Information exchange is not the first action to occur in iTOS. However, as soon as participants greet and introduce each other and/or negotiate any minor issue, they start exchanging information (iTOS-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10). Normally, they carry out this rhetorical action by asking each other questions (Excerpt 2).

Negotiation

Negotiation is the second-longest rhetorical action in this research corpus. In general, participants spend around eight minutes per session negotiating, which indicates its relevance.⁵Following Author, negotiation may be internally or externally motivated. Additionally, the various aspects negotiated throughout iTOS may occur within any other rhetorical action, and negotiation may be longer or shorter depending on what is negotiated.

Internally motivated negotiation emerges from the conversation, as in the negotiation of meaning or form. Whenever participants feel insecure about language use or face challenges, they stop the normal conversation flow to negotiate language - be it meaning or form. There are 111 instances of negotiation of language in the corpus. In some, learners ask for clarification after not fully understanding what the partner meant. In most instances, however, negotiation of language occurs as the partner spontaneously offers feedback or learners are uncertain about how to express something in the target language (Excerpt 3):

Saying Goodbye

Occupying around 30 seconds per session, the rhetorical action of saying goodbye is the only one with a fixed order. It is the last to occur and is mandatory for all sessions regardless of the learning scenario. Besides indicating they have to go - either because the class is over or the teacher is telling them to disconnect -, participants tend to emphasize that it has been a pleasure to meet (iTOS-2, 3, 4, 8, 9):

Excerpt 4. Saying goodbye (iTOS-8)

1. E: cool so we have to go but it was it was a pleasure meeting you I9M4

2. B: yeah

3. E: thank you again for ah all your correction in my texts

4. B: oh not at all aham so next week I’ll have to send my composition

5. E: yep

6. B: I think I’ll try to send it until Friday or Thursday

7. E: ok

8. B: I don’t know the the sooner I can correct it

9. E: yeah whenever you get a chance

10. B: ok

11. E: cool

12. B: cool

13. E: tchau

14. B: tchau até mais

15. E: take care ((risos))

Excerpt 4 also illustrates the malleability of iTOS as the action of saying goodbye intersects with negotiating a task they need to complete the upcoming week (lines 4-12).

Figure 1 represents itos in its total length and its recurrent rhetorical actions, that is, the actions that tend to be present in iTOS in all learning scenarios.

Figure 1: Recurrent rhetorical actions in iTOS

Source: Rampazzo (2021)

The arrows have dotted boundaries to indicate that the rhetorical actions may intersect and connect in different forms, despite always finishing with the action of saying goodbye.

Nevertheless, an additional rhetorical action appears in learning scenarios B and C, when learners had previously exchanged texts written in the target language.

Text Discussion

Text discussion is present in learning scenarios B and C only because learners had contacted each other before iTOS. In scenario B, learners from the American university had sent a text written in Portuguese to the Brazilian partner. During iTOS, dyads talk about the text. The rhetorical action is very brief and comments tend to concentrate on language form rather than genre characteristics, or topic. Despite being short, the presence of the rhetorical action suggests that learners are attentive to the tasks.

Text discussion in learning scenario C, on the contrary, is not brief. This action does not occur in the session with a substitute participant. While only one sample does not allow for the identification of organizational patterns, the occurrence of this action is consistent with the argument of iTOS malleability. In learning scenario C, learners also tend to focus on language use when commenting on the texts (Excerpt 5).