Mapping genres in order to facilitate the teaching and learning of writing in the disciplines (work in progress)

Within technical and engineering communication, this paper specifically frames the concept of microgenres and locates them within the well-established and now international field of genre studies. It describes a methodology for identifying microgenres and presents the promising early results related to the possibility of mapping these microgenres within a corpus of student texts produced for a writing-intensive engineering course. These results indicate that microgenres can be identified in a way that is valid and reliable. They reveal that there is the possibility of variation or that there are ways of organizing these microgenres in order to realize purpose. These results also suggest that we might be able to construct a typology or typologies of microgenres related to a particular course, potentially even disciplines within engineering and/or the field of engineering, and thereby facilitate student learning, participation, and assessment.