The genre modelling and research presented in this chapter originate from the sub-branch of Applied Linguistics concerned with theorising and designing courses for the teaching of academic literacy skills. Specifically, a model previously employed in the analysis of academic genres [13– 18] is used here as a basis for examining the particular web genre of an online news article followed by postings of reader comments – termed here a participatory news article. The chapter first provides an overview of approaches to the categorisation of texts in terms of genres, referring to a number of landmark studies and publications and considering some of the key difficulties in establishing systematic and comprehensive models that are able to account for all of the types of knowledge that writers and readers draw upon in order to identify and ratify a text as belonging to a particular genre category.
