An applied genre analysis of office hours consultations

This paper describes an examination of academic consultation discourse using an applied genre analytic approach (Bhatia 2002a) to inform English for academic purposes curriculum design and to contribute to interactional pragmatics and politeness research. The project employed a series of complementary genre and corpus-informed analyses, namely contextual (Tribble 2002), phase (Agar 1985), and interactional moves analysis (Swales 1990) focused on the use of framing (e.g. Goffman 1974), in conjunction with contrastive corpus analysis (Granger 1998). Data for the analyses originated in the office hours sub-corpus of MICASE (Simpson et al. 2002), and a spoken learner corpus of international teaching assistants in training (Reinhardt 2010). Results are interpreted using a model of directive language use in academic consultation discourse that considers appeals to choice and involvement as complementary rather than conflated. The genre of office hours emerges from the negotiated textualization of directive moves, framed around directive constructions using interactional politeness appeals.