Modelling of the Genre Short Story for Teaching Purposes: An Approach from a Systemic Functional Perspective

This article is framed in a research project called “Literature from a linguistic perspective: modelling and teaching of literary narrative genres and response genres” carried out within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). One of the aims of this project is to create a model of the generic macro-structure of the literary macro-genre short story to be used for teaching purposes. This model is developed on the basis of the existent categories of personal narratives (Plum 2004; Martin and Rose 2008; Salmaso 2014, 2017, 2021) and fairy tales (Hasan 1997) in SFL. This article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the generic macro-structure of six short stories. It provides a generic macro-structure potential for literary macro-genre short story, the elementary genres that are inserted in the constituents of this macro-genre and the reasons why such genres are inserted where they are. This article also presents a series of activities based on the generic macro-structure potential of short stories proposed, which provide a more objective tool for the analysis and comprehension of certain aspects of this macro-genre, like its organisation into different constituents, their purpose and their contribution to the overall purpose of the macro-genre, showing that systematic analysis of this genre can foster students' reading comprehension. This paper is expected to make, on the one hand, a theoretical contribution to SFL through an initial modelling of the macro-genre short story and, on the other hand, a practical contribution to the teaching of English through literature. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNCuyo; Mendoza, Argentina. In these subjects, literary narrative texts are used as an essential teaching tool to foster students’ development of different linguistic competences. These texts


Introduction
This article is framed in a research project called "Literature from a linguistic perspective: modelling and teaching of literary narrative genres and response genres" carried out within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This research is conducted in the subjects Language III and Language IV of the teaching training, translation and research courses of study of the English Department, at Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNCuyo; Mendoza, Argentina. In these subjects, literary narrative texts are used as an essential teaching tool to foster students' development of different linguistic competences. These texts provide the basis for students to work on and perfect their reading comprehension as well as their written and oral production skills. Therefore, the two main purposes of the research project are: (1) to model the generic structure of the literary genre short story in order to apply that model to improve students' reading comprehension and (2) to model the structure of oral response genres to help students perfect their oral production skills. This paper is concerned with the first of these objectives.
The interest in creating a model of the generic structure of the literary genre short story lies in the belief that a more detailed and careful analysis of the constituents of this genre can foster students' reading comprehension skills. At present, the approach to the texts in the above-mentioned subjects is mostly literary. The analysis focuses mainly on the plot of the texts, on the characters and how they develop or evolve, and on the themes and symbols present in the text. This type of analysis is carried out intuitively, i.e. according to the subjective impression that the readers -teachers and students -have of the texts. The analysis of the texts is not carried out from a linguistic perspective. There is no focus on the analysis of the sections or constituents of narrative texts: eventive constituents -which involve the presentation and succession of events -, descriptive constituents -which present the setting in place and time and characters -and evaluative constituents -which express the characters' feelings and thoughts -; nor is there focus on the purpose of each of the constituents and the contribution that each of them makes to the general purpose of the texts. Besides, there is no systematic analysis of the linguistic resources used in these constituents, for example, the difference between the processes used to present events and those used to describe characters, the logical and temporal organisation of events, the resources used to express the subjective or objective thoughts, feelings and opinions of people involved in the events.
This study is precisely concerned with modelling those aspects of the genre short story that are currently analysed intuitively, so as to raise awareness as regards the textual organisation of this genre -its constituents and the logical relations between them, and the purpose and contribution that each of them makes to the text as a whole -as well as the language resources -patterns of process types and thematic organisation, among others -that are used to achieve logical organisation and unity.
In this paper, I present the preliminary results of this research study on the basis of a small sample of short stories which have been used to produce an initial generic macro-structure potential of this macrogenre. I also present a set of activities that can be used to apply the findings to the teaching-learning process of short stories.

Systemic Functional Linguistics and Genre
The theoretical framework of this article is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This linguistic theory conceives language as a semiotic system, i.e. a system of choices used to negotiate meanings. The potential of the system of language as a meaning making resource is instantiated in the form of texts, which are authentic products of social interaction and are analysed in relation to the context in which they are produced -context of culture and context of situation and its variables of field (the topic or focus of the activity), tenor (the relationship between the interactants and/or the attitude towards the subject matter) and mode (the role that language plays in the interaction, written or spoken). The text types (lectures, emails, letters, interviews, articles, recipes, informal talks with friends, etc.) vary according to the context (situation type) in which they are used and are considered registers, which in this case refers to "the patterns of instantiation of the overall system associated with a given type of context (a situation type)" (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014, p. 29). Martin and Rose (2008, p.16) take Halliday's context of situation and they add another context stratum, context of culture; they model genre at this stratum, which is above the context of situation and its variables. They define genre a "staged goal-oriented social process" (Martin & Rose, 2007, p. 8). Genres are social processes since they are the product of social interaction. They are goal-oriented because we use them with a purpose, i.e. to achieve a certain goal. And they are staged because they have a structure made up of different stages or constituents, each of which has a specific purpose that helps achieve the general purpose of the genre.
Narrative genres have been widely studied in SFL (Hasan, 1996;Martin & Rose, 2007, 2008Martin, 2008;Martin & Plum, 1997;Plum, 2004;Rothery, 1994;Rothery and Stenglin, 1997;Jordens & Little, 2001;Jordens, et al., 2004;Eggins & Slade, 1997;Salmaso 2014Salmaso , 2017Salmaso , 2021. Taking as a point of departure the generalised structure of narratives studied by Labov (1972) and Labov and Waletzky (1997), five story genres are proposed in SFL: recount, anecdote, narrative, exemplum and observation, initially proposed by Plum (2004) and later revisited by Martin and Rose (2008). Salmaso (2014Salmaso ( , 2017Salmaso ( , 2021 introduces some changes to the family of story genres in order to make it more flexible, among other reasons. Based on Rosch's (1978) Prototype Theory and Hasan's (1996) Generic Structure Potential (GSP), Salmaso (2014Salmaso ( , 2017Salmaso ( , 2021 conceives story genres as Categories of Narrative Instances (CaNIs), which are heterogenous and non-discrete categories that have members that are more representative of each of the five categories (recount, anecdote, narrative, exemplum and observation) than others; the most representative being those NIs that present all the constituents (obligatory and non-obligatory) of their category in a canonical order, and less representative those NIs that have, for example, only the obligatory constituents of their category in a rhetorical order different from the canonical one. Salmaso (2014Salmaso ( , 2017Salmaso ( , 2021 presents the concept of Complex NIs (CoNIs). She explains that, when narrating orally and spontaneously, speakers clarify certain aspects of their narratives and/or add extra information and, therefore, insert one or more NI in the different constituents of the general or main narrative, which results in a CoNI. NIs are restricted in occurrence to being inserted into eventive constituents -denoting disruptive and non-disruptive events -and evaluative constituentsfeelings, thoughts and ideas of the narrator and/or of the characters involved in the events -of a CoNI. Salmaso (2017Salmaso ( , 2021 shows that the concept of CoNIs not only applies to oral and spontaneous texts but also to written and carefully polished texts. One final concept which interweaves with the idea of CoNIs and which is essential for this article is macro-genre. Martin (1994) defines macro-genres as the combination of elementary genres. I enlarge on this definition and define micro-genres as the recurrent combination of elementary genres, which, being a combination that is iterative and frequent, can be captured in a generic macro-structure potentialdrawing on Hasan's (1996) notion of GSP.

Discussion and Hypothesis
Even though there is a long tradition of studies on narratives in SFL, there are no studies so far that have modelled the generic structure of the genre short story. There are similarities between short stories, nursery tales (Hasan, 1996) and the five CaNIs (or story genres) of personal experience, as they all share characteristics that are inherently narrative, i.e. logically and chronologically organised eventsdisruptive and non-disruptive -, characters that interact in a particular setting in time and place, and an evaluative element, which typically refers to the expression of affection, desire and beliefs of the narrator or of the participants involved in the events. Therefore, I draw on the GSP proposed by Hasan (1996) and on the five CaNIs of personal experience; however, the structure of short stories is more complex and intricate and can more optimally be accounted for by analysing it as a CoNI (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021 with one or more NI inserted in its constituents, and by modelling it as a macro-genre, in a generic macro-structure potential.
As mentioned before, even if I draw upon the works of Hasan (1996), Plum (2004) and Martin and Rose (2008), the study of short stories based on Salmaso's proposal (2014Salmaso's proposal ( , 2017Salmaso's proposal ( , 2021 provides more flexibility and precision to the previously mentioned taxonomies. All the characteristics of this proposal (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021 are useful for the purposes of determining the generic macro-structure potential of short stories. However, it was the concept of CoNIs which generated the idea of modelling short stories as a macro-genre because it made it evident that, if NIs of personal experience which are long and intricate can have other NIs inserted in their constituents, so can literary narrative genres like short stories. Therefore, one central hypotheses of this research and the main hypothesis of this paper is that it is possible to model the generic structure of short stories as a generic macro-structure potential which shows the typical structure of CoNI short story and the different combinations of elementary genres -narrative genres in particular, but also other elementary genres -that can be inserted in its constituents.
As regards the pedagogical implications of the model of short stories, the explicit knowledge of the generic macro-structure potential can help teachers go deeper into the analysis of instances of this macrogenre, which, in turn, can help students improve their understanding of the texts they are exposed to and apply this knowledge to the development of other competences, i.e. written and oral production of essays and oral presentations they have to produce on the basis of short stories.

Methodology
The approach to texts in this study is mainly qualitative, privileging an exhaustive analysis of the texts over data quantity. The material used for the analysis was retrieved from the texts used in Language III and IV, which are the university subjects this research is conducted in. For this preliminary study, I have chosen 6 (six) short stories, whose selection process was based on the length of the texts. In this initial study, I analyse short short stories because of the assumption that they have a less complex structure, which allows for proposing a simple generic macro-structure potential first, to then move on to a more complex one. The analysis of texts is carried out in the following way. First, the whole text is read thoroughly, bearing in mind the five CaNIs of personal experience (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021 in order to identify the main or general structure of the text by identifying its purpose, its constituents and the specific purpose of the constituents; in other words, I identify whether the general structure and purpose of the short story is that of a recount, anecdote, narrative, exemplum or observation. Once the general structure is identified, the next step is the identification of its constituents and their purpose and, later on, the identification of inserted genres in those constituents. This identification is based on the purpose of the section of the text, changes in topic and in setting and characters. After each of the inserted genres is identified, their constituents and their purpose are analysed. Once the whole text is labelled in terms of constituents of the general structure, genres inserted in the constituents and constituents of the inserted genres, I prepare a linear structure of the texts which allows me to identify differences and similarities between the different short stories in order to explain why certain genres are inserted in certain constituents and to come up with a generic macro-structure potential. Due to space restrictions, only one example of the six short stories analysed is presented in the Analysis and Results section of this article. This example is "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury. At the beginning of the example, the general structure of the short story is stated and the text is divided into constituents according to their purpose and the constituents are labelled between square brackets. The inserted genres in each of the constituents are introduced with a colon (:) and also labelled between square brackets; the type of inserted genres is stated and numbered. The genres are expressed in lower-case letters and the constituents with initial capital letters. All the labels are in bold. Table 1 is a summary of the five CaNIs which are used in this section to explain the example, draw generalisations about the six texts analysed, and to present the initial generic macro-structure potential proposed for the macro-genre short story. Table 1 Categories of NIs: Definition and Generic Structure (adapted from Salmaso, 2017) Category of NI Recount: Series of nondisruptive events that are culturally significant. Recounts are typically used to evaluate the effects of the events or the participants in those events.

Analysis and Results
Narrative: Series of events with a disruption which gets solved, either because an actual solution is provided or because there is an adaptation to the new situation created by the disruption.
Anecdote: Series of events with a disruption which produces a reaction in a participant in the events or the narrator of the events. The reaction is typically interpreted by a participant/ narrator.
Exemplum: Series of events with a disruption which are narrated to judge the behaviour of a participant involved in the events.
Observation: Series of events with a disruption which are told to show the effects of the disruption on the narrator. Example "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury This example has been chosen as it is short and presents a relatively simple generic structure. The general structure of the short story belongs to the CaNI narrative -which will herein be referred to as short story or general narrative -in that it has the following constituents: Abstract, Record of Events, Disruption, Resolution and Coda. Deeper analysis of each of the constituents of the text shows the genres -NIs in general, but there is also a descriptive report -that are inserted in the different constituents of this short story. The short story begins with a fusion of the Abstract and Orientation. Fusion occurs when the function of two or more constituents is interspersed; in NIs, typically the Abstract and the Orientation are fused, as are the Resolution and Coda (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021. The function of the Abstract is to briefly anticipate the main event in a NI and the purpose of the Orientation is to present characters and setting in time and place. In the Abstract / Orientation of the general structure of "The Pedestrian", a descriptive report is inserted -the purpose of descriptive reports is to classify and describe a phenomenon (Martin and Rose, 2008, p. 131). This descriptive report presents the main protagonist, Leonard Mead, his likes and his habits: to walk in the city at night even though it is against the law. The habits presented in the inserted descriptive report provide information not only about the protagonist but also about the city and the habits of its inhabitants, anticipating the central event of the short story. This section clearly performs the functions of the Abstract and Orientation, which are realized by the inserted descriptive report.

Abstract/Orientation of the general narrative: descriptive report [Protagonist's Likes of the inserted descriptive report] To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what [Presentation of the protagonist of the inserted descriptive report] Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. [protagonist's habits of the inserted descriptive report]
He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.
Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.
Mr. Leonard Mead would pause, cock his head, listen, look, and march on, his feet making no noise on the lumpy walk. For long ago he had wisely changed to sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure, himself, in the early November evening.
The following constituent in the short story is the Record of Events. The function of the Record of Events is to present a series of non-disruptive events. The Record of Events is realised by an inserted recount. This realisation is only natural since the recount is the only category out of the five CaNIs that does not have a disruptive event; therefore, its purpose partly coincides with the purpose of the constituent of the short story it realises: the Record of Events shows a series of events retelling one of Leonard Mead's typical walks at night, which presents no disruptive event. But the importance of the inserted recount is that it is not just made up of events, but it has other constituents that contribute to adding information to the general narrative, which is typical of short stories, for example, more characters and places and expressions of evaluation of the characters and events. In the example, the inserted recount has an Orientation, that presents the specific place and time where the central events in the short story take place. There is also an Evaluation that the main character makes of the deserted city and the night activities of its citizens. The recount also has a Coda that closes this particular event before the events leading up to the Disruption of the short story start. In the Disruption of the general narrative there is an inserted anecdote. I have found out that anecdotes typically realise Disruptions, presumably because anecdotes have the purpose of presenting a disruptive event and the reaction of the character/s. Therefore, the insertion of this type of text in the Disruption of the general narrative allows for the inclusion not only of a disruptive event but also of the reaction of the character/s, before moving on to the Resolution of the general narrative. In this particular example, the disruptive event is that Leonard Mead is found by a police car walking alone in the streets at night, which is forbidden, and the characters engage in a dialogue which shows a succession of Disruptions and Reactions -fusion of Disruption and Reaction -which helps build an atmosphere of tension before the Resolution of the short story.

[ Disruption/Reaction of inserted anecdote 1] A metallic voice called to him:
"Stand still. Stay where you are! Don't move!" He halted.

"Your hands up! Or we'll Shoot!"
The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left, wasn't that correct? Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets. He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all.

"Get in."
He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there.

[Interpretation of the Reaction of inserted anecdote 1] "Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi," said the iron voice. "But-"
The Resolution of the general narrative shows how the Disruption is solved; i.e. Leonard Mead is taken to a mental institution because of his unusual behaviour of walking alone at night. In the Resolution there is no inserted NI. So far, I have not found any resolution with inserted NIs or any other genre.

[Resolution of the general narrative]
"Where are you taking me?" The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. "To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies." He got in. The door shut with a soft thud. The police car rolled through the night avenues, flashing its dim lights ahead.
In the Coda general narrative, a final event is presented that wraps up or finishes off the short story: on the way to the mental institution Leonard Mead sees his house that at is different from the other houses in the city in that all the lights of the house are on, showing how peculiar Leonard Mead is in relation to the other inhabitants. As with the Resolution, there is no NI or other genre inserted in this example of the Coda and I have not found any Coda where there is an inserted NI or other genre in the examples analysed up to now.
[Coda of the general narrative] They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of houses that were dark, but this one particular house had all of its electric lights brightly lit, every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness.

International Journal of TESOL Studies 4 (2) 48
No one answered him.

The car moved down the empty river-bed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty side-walks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night.
The example that has just been analysed can be represented in a linear structure as shown below. The constituents of the short story or general narrative are expressed between braces and in bold and their order of occurrence is expressed with a caret ( ˆ ). When there is an inserted NI or another inserted genre, it is presented with a colon ( : ) and the constituents of the inserted NIs or other inserted genres are presented between square brackets; a caret is also used to show the order in which they are presented. This linear structure was prepared for each of the examples analysed in order to make generalisations and to be able to come up with a preliminary generic macro-structure potential for short stories, which is expressed below with a linear structure, which is then captured in a system network to clearly display the options. In both the linear structure and the system network, the constituents of the inserted NIs have not been included, on the one hand, for the sake of simplicity and, on the other hand, because they are the same constituents of the five categories of NIs mentioned and described in Table 1. (For details about the definition of the purpose of the constituents of each category see Salmaso 2014Salmaso , 2017 In the following linear representation of the generic macro-structure potential of short stories three additional symbols are used: ˇ which means "or", a small arrow above constituents that can iterate, and parentheses () to show optional constituents. The obligatory constituents are the ones found in the examples analysed, and the optional constituents are those that are present in the generic structure of narratives and anecdotes which may appear in other examples and which, therefore, need to be considered for the generic macro-structure potential of short stories.  The generalisations expressed in the above representations can be explained in more simple terms. Out of the six short stories analysed, five have the generic structure of the CaNI narrative and one of them of the CaNI anecdote. The assumption is that those short stories that present a closed ending have the generic structure of the category narrative, which provides a Resolution to the central Disruption, while those that have an open ending present the generic structure of the category anecdote, which only provides a Reaction to the main Disruption. I present the constituents of the generic macro-structure of short stories in a canonical order, but have found that the canonical order can be altered according to the needs of the narrator/ author when recounting a story-canonical vs rhetorical order of constituents (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021 The Orientation of short stories is not realised by any NI. This is in keeping with the idea that NIs cannot be inserted in descriptive constituents (Orientation and Reorientation) because these constituents present and describe participants and places but do not present events (Salmaso, 2014(Salmaso, , 2017(Salmaso, , 2021. I have also found that the Orientation may be realised by a descriptive report, describing the participants and their habits, mainly, but their likes and dislikes as well.
In most of the cases the Orientation is fused with the Abstract. It is important to point out that the events presented in these cases belong to the Abstract. In the examples analysed, the Abstract is realised by observations. The reason for this insertion is the brevity with which the events are narrated in observations, which is precisely the point of Abstracts, i.e. to briefly present the main event of the narrative or anecdote which is later on developed in the Disruptions.
In all the examples analysed, the Record of Events is realised by a recount. The reason is that the function of the Record of Events is to present a series of events without disruption, which is precisely the purpose of recounts, of course, with the addition of descriptions of characters, place and time and evaluations of different types, which further justify their insertion in the generic macro-structure of short stories. Disruptions seem to be most often realised by anecdotes, which present a Disruption and a Reaction to that Disruption. At other times, Disruptions are realised by narratives which immediately present a partial Resolution to the whole short story. Another finding is that Disruptions can be realised by observations when the events in the Disruption are brief and the Evaluation focuses on the quality of the events or place of the events rather than on the characters.
Resolutions have similar realisations to those of the Disruption. When the Resolution is realised by an anecdote, there is no actual Resolution but an attitude of the characters that shows some sort of adaptation to the Disruption. When the Resolution is realised by a narrative there is an actual Resolution, i.e. the Disruption is solved either positively or negatively, for or against the benefit of the characters. In the case of the Resolution realised by an observation, the emphasis is put more on the evaluation as an outcome, for example, how the characters benefited from or where negatively affected by the Disruption.
These generalisations are true for both, the general structure of short stories as a narrative or as an anecdote, in the coincidental aspects of the structures. There is a difference, however, because when a short story has the structure of an 'anecdote, it presents a Reaction. In the only example of this case analysed so far, the Reaction is expressed by a recount. The reason is that there is no need to present a further disruption -and recounts express a series of non-disruptive events -but there is need for evaluation, and the Evaluation of recounts is very broad since it can express affection, judgement and appreciation of the characters, place and events, which makes it ideal in this situation.

Pedagogical Applications
The activities presented in this section were prepared by two members of our research project team, Trans. Mauro Constantini and Prof. Sonia Gatica. The following activities are aimed at providing resources for teachers to apply the theoretical concept proposed in this article, i.e. the generic macrostructure of short stories, based on the pedagogy developed by educational linguists within SFL. We follow the Teaching-Learning Cycle (1992 DSP Primary Curriculum [Murray andZammit, 1992] in Martin 1999), which serves as a scaffold to guide students into the process of writing different types of genres. The cycle has four stages: Negotiating Field, Deconstruction, Joint Construction and Independent Construction. The activities herein developed belong to the Deconstruction and Independent Construction stages, which are explained along with the activities suggested. Those stages of the teaching-learning cycle which are not included in the following activities are also expected to be dealt with in the classroom, and will be briefly mentioned along with the activities suggested. It is important to point out that students are already acquainted with the concept of genre from an SFL perspective, as well as with the five CaNIs that are the elementary genres that are essential to understand the generic macrostructure of short stories.
The text chosen for these activities is "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury, which was analysed in the Analysis and Results section of this paper. Students are expected to have read the text before the class. Before teacher and students start working with the proposed activities, they go through the Negotiating Field stage of the cycle in order to get a deep understanding of the field of the text, the author and the type of short stories he writes, and the types of activities they will carry out, before going to the Deconstruction Stage, which is dealt with in the first activity.

First activity: Deconstruction
First, teacher and students analyse the linear structure of the genre short story. This linear structure helps students see the structure of the genre graphically, which is ideal for the analysis of the different constituents of the text that they will carry out in this first activity. The teacher makes sure that every student understands the purpose of each constituent and how to recognize them and proceeds to explain the instructions for the first activity.
In this stage, the teacher gives students a set of questions to discuss and find the purpose of the different constituents of the short story "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury. This activity focuses only on the general structure of the short story and not on the analysis of the inserted NIs. However, the same type of activity can be done to go deeper into the structure, i.e. into analysis and purpose of the inserted genres. The text is presented to the students divided into constituents but the constituents are not labelled. Constituent 1 is the Abstract/ Orientation, constituent 2 is the Record of Events, constituent 3 is the Disruption, constituent 4 is the Resolution and Constituent 5 is the Coda. The labels are given to the students separately for them to name each of the constituents once they answer the questions and find out the purpose of the constituents. The names of the constituents are not given in the canonical order so that students cannot use the order as a guide to label the constituents. The following are the questions that the teacher gives to the students. The instruction for the students is the following: Read the questions that have been prepared for you to find out the purpose of the different constituents of the short story. Answer the questions and be prepared to discuss them with the rest of the class. Once you have answered the questions and you are sure of the purpose of each section, use the following labels to name each of the constituents: Resolution, Record of Events, Disruption, Coda, Abstract/Orientation, bearing in mind the purpose of the constituents you have been taught. 1. What does the character do in this constituent? 2. Are the events presented disruptive or non-disruptive? What is the most frequently used tense and what is the difference between the verb tense used in this section and in the previous one? 3. What do you believe is the purpose of this constituent? What is the label you would choose for this constituent? Why? or why not? Now focus on the character of Leonard Mead. What do you think happened to him after he was taken to the Psychiatric centre? You will write a short short story about these events. You need to provide a setting in place and time, and a description of the main character -an Orientation -a series of non-disruptive events that lead up to a Disruption -a Record of Events -an event that changes the normal course of events -a Disruption -and an event that solves the disruptive event or shows the way in which the character adapts to it -a Resolution. These are the obligatory constituents but you may also include other constituents like an Evaluation of the place, characters and/or events, a Reorientation in time and/or place and a Coda with a final event or final reflection to give an ending to your short story. Students, together with the teacher, may go over the different stages of the cycle as many times as necessary to perfect different drafts students submit until they come up with a final, polished short story.

Conclusions
This article had a twofold purpose: to present generic macro-structure potential for the genre short story and to prove its usefulness for teaching purposes. On the one hand, it provides a generic macro-structure potential for the genre short story, which I have presented at an initial stage based on the analysis of a small corpus of six short stories. However, the flexibility of the generic macro-structure potential of short stories presented makes it easily applicable to the analysis of any instance of this genre. This leads to the second purpose of this paper, i.e. to show that the generic macro-structure potential of short stories is useful for the analysis and production of this macro-genre for teaching purposes. Even though the structure of short stories proposed may seem a bit complex at first sight, the two activities presentedonly two due to space restrictions -prove its applicability and simplicity. These two activities were based on two stages the Teaching-learning Cycle (1992 DSP Primary Curriculum [Murray andZammit, 1992] in Martin, 1999) but it is possible to propose many more activities at the different stages of this cycle.
This article and the theory developed in it, as well as the pedagogical activities presented, are just a stepping-stone for a deeper and more complex insight into the generic macro-structure of the genre short story. In the research project this article is framed in, "Literature from a linguistic perspective: modelling and teaching of literary narrative genres and response genres", we have already started working on a lexico-grammatical analysis of the short stories to prove that the stages proposed at a generic level have a lexico-grammatical correlation -on the basis of process patterns through a transitivity analysis -and our aim is to continue with a thematic progression pattern analysis and with an analysis of the different ways -for example, logico-sematic relations -which account for the internal combination of genres within the generic macro-structure potential of short stories.