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A SOCIAL THEORY OF TEXT 93

choices in predictable ways’. ‘Field’ is the term used to describe the
‘social goings on, what the text is about’; ‘mode’ is the term which is used to
describe the realisational mode through which the text finds its material form;
and ‘tenor’ describes the social relations of the participants in all this. Clearly, in
this definition everything that goes on in the text is included in the definition of
genre, though the initial focus is on the ‘staged, goal-oriented processes’, that is,
an emphasis on the social goal that is to be achieved by means of the genre. Most
other definitions of the term tend to be equally inclusive, even though the
emphases may differ somewhat.
In my approach to genre I take it to be one of three significant factors (there
are others) in the constitution of text, along with discourse and mode. For me the
term is best used to describe one aspect of textual organisation, namely that
which realises and allows us to understand the social relations of the participants
in the making, the reception and the reading/interpretation of the text. Equally
central is what I have referred to as ‘issues’ above, and call, following the work
of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1959), discourse – the organisation
of content/material from a particular institutional point of view, as in ‘legal
discourse’, ‘religious discourse’, ‘sexist discourse’. Beyond this we need to
attend to realisational mode, for instance the form of language we are dealing
with: is it speech or is it writing, or in multimodal contetxs, is it writing and
image, or combinations of other modes? Each leads to differently organised
textual and grammatical forms. Some of the other matters that are important in
understanding text are questions such as dialect for instance, age, gender – the
facts of biology which make men’s and women’s voices differ. And while these
factors may not affect the overall organisation of a text, all these make spoken or
written texts importantly different.
In other words, text is, for me, a large category, and it is text which needs to
be understood, whether you are an English teacher, a linguist/academic, or,
increasingly, a teacher of any subject in the school, in England certainly. And as
I will say in this chapter as elsewhere in this book, text and the design of text
needs to be newly understood in multimodal communication. However, I now
want to be more specific about genre and what it is. I will look at three texts
which I consider to be – broadly – in the same genre, which I shall call ‘rules and
regulations’. The focus here is to see in aspects of the texts traces of the social
relations of the participants in the production of the text. Here is the first text:

Swimming club rules

1 Parents must accompany and take responsibility for their children at
all times, unless the child is in the water in an instructed class. Note –
In most cases this will mean one adult enrolling with one child, or, if
they so wish one adult with more than one child provided it is
understood they are responsible for them.