Recent years have seen a considerable growth in the area of genre-based languagestudies. Taking fiction reviews as a type of genre text, this study aims to develop anapproach which is capable of facilitating the interpretation and possible creation ofthis genre type.The research undertaken has four objectives. First, to study the generic functions ofreviews, statistical method is used to analyze the previously compiled corpus toidentify "genre-specific"words, which will be categorized in terms of their functions.The second objective is to propose a generic framework for the analysis of genretext. Based on a critical review of Swales move approach, it is found that thestructural move analysis pays little attention to the functional aspect of genre. As asupplement to Swales model, an approach is developed which combines genericfunctions with the framework of genre to examine the occurrence of lexical items andpatterns in the corpus. The results suggest that fiction reviews show evidence ofgeneric framing, with conventionalized language realizing contextual, metatextual andintertextual functions.The third objective is to explore the issue of "form-function correlations" bycombining the generic framework with Swales move approach. Statistical measuresare carried out to compare linguistic patterns of different moves of the genre.Differences between the constituent moves will be taken as evidence that differentmoves have different generic functions, whilst similarities between them will showthat they share a few functions though for the most part they differ substantially.The fourth objective is to apply the findings to two fiction reviews from Newsweekand Time. The reason for choosing the reviews from different sources is to considerthe validity of the approach. These case studies suggest that the use of genericframework not only enables the identification of conventionalized linguistic featuresof the text but also indicates that the occurring frequency of specific lexical items andpatterns in any one text is lowThe study concludes that using the generic framework for the analysis of genre textseems to be a supplement to Swales move approach and by analyzing the genericfunctions of different moves we can avoid such inadequacies as exhibited in Swalesmodel like "discourse community"and specialized functions of discourse. Moreover,the study of "form-function correlations"offers learners a chance to explore languagetypically used to realize the generic functions of fiction reviews and in doing so, aidthe development of the skills necessary for the interpretation and creation of new textswithin the genre.