Recent work in applied linguistics has focused on genre from rhetorical, educational, and critical perspectives (e.g. Bazerman Reference Bazerman1988, Bhatia Reference Bhatia1993, Fairclough Reference Fairclough2003, Hyland Reference Hyland2004, Johns Reference Johns2002, Kress Reference Kress, Cope and Kalantzis1993, Paltridge Reference Paltridge2001, Swales Reference Swales1990, van Leeuwen Reference van Leeuwen1993). The notion of genre has been important to an understanding of how cultures organize in linguistic ways. From Vladimir Propp's (Reference Propp1968) analysis of Russian folktales to William Labov's description of oral narratives (Labov & Waletzky Reference Labov, Waletzky and Helm1967) and Bakthin's (1986) investigations of speech genres, linguists have found the idea of socially structured ways of using language to satisfy social purposes key in understanding the role of language in social life.

This valuable introduction to the genre theory of the Sydney School by Martin and Rose provides a theoretical and analytic framework to understand language as a form of social practice. The focus of the book is on genre as a configuration of meanings and map of culture. Here genre is defined as a staged goal-oriented social process. Genres are not only types of texts defined by formal structural or semantic features, but recurrent configurations of meaning produced by speakers and writers in the process of achieving some social purpose. Martin and Rose's genre theory is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a functional model of language and other forms of communication. They provide a rich description of several genres to inform discourse analysis, pedagogic work, and other research on language and culture. In addition, they also bring a critical perspective to our understanding of genre by highlighting how “social experience produces differences in access to the genre systems that have evolved in a culture” (18). This critical perspective is motivated by the authors' sociopolitical goal of contributing to equity and access in the ways language is taught in schools through the design of educational interventions. According to the authors, this approach to genre is socio-semiotic, integrated within a functional theory of language and with basic concepts that apply across strata and modalities of communication while being committed to social action.

The book consists of six chapters that include concrete examples, mostly using texts from Australian culture, that illustrate each of the genres investigated. Ch. 1 offers a brief history of the Sydney genre school and its theoretical foundations. This chapter presents the motivations for the work, the distinguishing features of this approach to genre, the theoretical framework that informs it, and the tools used for genre analysis. The rest of the chapters focus on different families of genres (i.e. stories, recounts and accounts, reports and explanations, and hybrid, multimodal, or mixed genres). While focusing on particular genre families, each of these chapters also has a theoretical focus, looking at genre from a typological and topological perspective. This look at genre offers readers the possibility to think about genres in particular by classifying them, as well as in terms of genre relations, focusing on their likeness. Key ideas presented include macro genres, field (uncommon sense grammatical metaphor), learner pathways, and multimodality. The last chapter of the book establishes a dialogue with other approaches to genre. The two main issues addressed at the end of the book are the critiques that the Sydney school has been subjected to for their genre approach to teaching literacy: what is language for (i.e. self-expression or social tool) and how is it learned (i.e. individual acquisition or social apprenticeship). The other key controversy in literacy studies, that of social reproduction vs. social change, is also discussed here. The authors present their stance very directly, pointing to the need to socialize nonmainstream students into powerful genres and at the same time to introduce a critical perspective. These arguments are used to highlight the importance of developing an intervention to ensure access to powerful forms of discourse and to offer a critique of the status quo. Transformation of inequality results from having the possibility to understand and deploy powerful genres for new purposes that serve the less powerful's interests.

This great introduction to genre analysis and to the Sydney School will be of interest to educational linguists, educators, discourse analysts, and other people studying culture and language. However, there are a couple of changes that could have made the book more accessible to those new to the topic of genre and this particular perspective. First, it would have been nice to have more development and explanation of how register and genre work together. The model of context in relation to language used here builds from the idea that language use varies according to the situation (i.e. register) and adds another layer where context of culture is accounted for by considering social processes that are recognizable and realized in patterned ways (i.e. genre). What are the relations between genre and register? And how is it different or similar to look at language use from these two points of view? What do we gain theoretically and analytically by examining language from this more abstract perspective?

The second issue has to do with the level of knowledge of SFL that is required to understand the genre analyses presented as examples. The examples are thoroughly analyzed, but sometimes it is difficult (even for someone with an SFL background) to fully appreciate the meaning and value of the analysis, and the links between discourse-semantic and lexico-grammatical level features. The analysis relies on discourse semantic tools that include five major categories: appraisal, ideation, conjunction, identification, and periodicity. These tools come from Martin & Rose Reference Martin and Rose2007 and may not be clear to someone who is not familiar with their discourse analysis model. Maybe using fewer texts as examples with more explanation of the analysis performed could make them more accessible to the unfamiliar reader.

Genre relations is a unique introduction to the investigation of language in culture, providing theoretical and analytic tools to contribute to the understanding of language as social practice. One of the best aspects of the book is the way it integrates description and theory and links them to social practice and intervention. The authors are able to demonstrate that there need not be distinctions between contributions to theory and practice because their work has importance for both.