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Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

This article reports on an international study of the teaching of undergraduate mathematics in seven countries. Informed by rhetorical genre theory, activity theory, and the notion of Communities of Practice, this study explores a pedagogical genre at play in university mathematics lecture classrooms. The genre is mediational in that it is a tool employed in the activity of teaching. The data consist of audio/video-recorded lectures, observational notes, semistructured interviews, and written artifacts collected from 50 participants who differed in linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds; teaching experience; and languages of instruction. The study suggests that chalk talk, namely, writing out a mathematical narrative on the board while talking aloud, is the central pedagogical genre of the undergraduate mathematics lecture classroom. Pervasive pedagogical genres, like chalk talk, which develop within global disciplinary communities of practice, appear to override local differences across contexts of instruction. Better understanding these genres may lead to new insights regarding academic literacies and teaching.

This article explores the role of students’ prior, or antecedent, genre knowledge in relation to their developing disciplinary genre competence by drawing on an illustrative example of an engineering genre-competence assessment. The initial outcomes of this diagnostic assessment suggest that students’ ability to successfully identify and characterize rhetorical and textual features of a genre does not guarantee their successful writing performance in the genre. Although previous active participation in genre production (writing) seems to have a defining influence on students’ ability to write in the genre, such participation appears to be a necessary but insufficient precondition for genre-competence development. The authors discuss the usefulness of probing student antecedent genre knowledge early in communication courses as a potential source for macrolevel curriculum decisions and microlevel pedagogical adjustments in course design, and they propose directions for future research.

This article discusses the development of a unified social theory of genre learning based on the integration of rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and the situated learning perspective. The article proposes that these three theoretical perspectives are compatible and complementary, and it illustrates applications of a unified framework to a study of genre learning by novice engineers. The author draws examples from a longitudinal qualitative study of a group of novice engineers who developed their professional genre knowledge through both academic and workplace experiences. These examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the study of professional genre learning.

This article discusses a longitudinal case study of a novice engineer who has successfully challenged a workplace genre. The study shows that a combination of the novice’s family background, a university engineering communication course, and workplace experiences helped him achieve success. It also provides evidence that, even though genres may differ from workplace to workplace, experienced professionals do recognize and accept superior communication practices imported from elsewhere. Thus, best practices may be taught apart from local contexts. The case study allows technical communication instructors and researchers to refine current understanding of what mastering genres means and indicates directions for the development of new pedagogies.

Using activity theory as a supplement to genre studies, this article explores a case of the disintegration of a traditional engineering firm. It focuses on the causes of such disintegration and the role of different types of communication in serving as sites where contradictions can be brought to visibility and resolution. The authors’ goal is both to show the power of activity theory in illuminating issues of tension, contradiction, and dissonance that lead to the breakup of the original organization into two separate firms and point to fundamental differences in the cultures of traditional engineering firms and software design enterprises.

This article describes a discipline‐specific communication course for engineering students offered by a Canadian university. The pedagogy of this course is based on North American theories of genre and theories of situated learning. In keeping with these theories, the course provides a context in which students acquire rhetorical skills and strategies necessary to integrate into a discipline‐specific discourse community. The authors argue that such a pedagogical approach can be used to design communication courses tailored to the needs of any discipline if the following three key conditions are met: assignments are connected to subject matter courses, a dialogic environment is provided, and the nature of assignments allows students to build on their learning experiences in the course.

The periodic engineering report can become a source of conflict and frustration when North American engineers collaborate with colleagues abroad. To overcome such difficulties, technical companies may hire writing consultants, who then take on the additional role of cultural interpreters, helping the partners bridge differences in both the practice of engineering and the language and culture of each country. As such a writing consultant, I worked with a Canadian engineering company, its Russian contractors, and a Russian translator to analyze the sources of difficulties in their reports. The language of the reports was English, but differences in tone as well as reader expectations about organization, format, and appropriate content caused misunderstandings among the collaborators. Contrastive rhetorical analysis helped to identify problems in both the conception of the report as a document and the translation of particular text.