Critical genre analysis of principal’s remarks

Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) is a theory of interdiscursive performance taking a multi-perspective approach to account for professional practice, demystify the interdiscursive nature of professional genres, account for professional identities, understand professional communication as interdiscursive performance, and provide evidence-based pedagogical insights. The present paper capitalizes upon CGA to analyze the genre of Principal’s Remarks, which originate from a speech delivered by the school principal on the anniversary and annual speech day of a school to report the development of the school. A total of 12 Principal’s Remarks of an aided Christian secondary school in Hong Kong, China released in 12 consecutive years were incorporated into the corpus for analysis. The genre was analyzed at four levels, which conceptualize discourse as text, genre, professional practice, and social practice respectively. The study exemplifies how CGA can be capitalized upon to analyze an unfamiliar genre in a multi‑perspective fashion.