This paper responds to Michael Rosen's blog entries, "How Genre Theory Saved the World", arguing that genre theory in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has made an important contribution to language and literacy pedagogy. It emerged in the Australian context in about 1980 and was initially developed in response to…

To help children better understand and exert control over the use of narrative language, teachers need not only to devote time to children's literature, but also need to emphasize other narrative forms including the mass media and children's own stories (in their talk, writing, drawing, and play). Giving children experience in mass media…

If young readers (adolescents) are introduced to a range of story structures and less structured texts (or "deviant narratives"), it may encourage the development of more diverse and accommodating schemata and the capacity to make inferences about the link between discourse units. It is, after all, a basic principle of recent narrative…