Patricia Mayes
Linking Micro and Macro Social Structure Through Genre Analysis
Patricia Mayes is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Her interests include interaction in institutional settings, the relationship between participant roles and social identities as they are interactionally constructed, and the relationship between grammar and interaction. She has recently begun examining these issues in teacher-student writing conferences between native and non-native English speakers. Her publications include the book, Language, Social Structure, and Culture: A Genre Analysis of Cooking Classes in Japan and America (Benjamins, 2003).
In this study, a genre analysis approach is used to compare how participants in Japanese and American cooking classes construct this rhetorical situation in ways that are similar yet different. A micro-level analysis of contextual variables and language use reveals how the participants constructed the situation and their social identities in different ways in each culture and that these differences reflected not only the participants’ personal intentions but also the structures of the institutions that offered the classes. It is argued that close examination of the actions of individual participants is a necessary step in furthering our understanding of more macro-level structures such as cooking schools, other types of institutions, and even theoretical concepts such as culture and social structure.
