Genre Approaches in ESL writing
By Michael Rabbidge - Materials writer
Teaching students to write often doesn’t extend beyond grammatical features and the ability of students to demonstrate a mastery beyond said features. But when it is all said and done, writing is an act of communication that comes with its own expectations about the roles of not only the writer, but also the audience. Writing for a variety of purposes and differing contexts is a fundamental language skill, and therefore the ability to teach students the importance of knowing contexts and purposes is paramount to successful language education. That being said, literacy instruction that allows students to develop explicit knowledge about specific writing genres can be challenging for language educators.
To help with this predicament, one good place to start is with something known as the Genre-based Approach to writing instruction. This approach chooses to focus on how language is used to create content specific knowledge as a way of linking language, context, and purpose (Gebhard & Harman, 2011). This approach employs work done by different researchers who have investigated a variety of different genres in different academic and learning contexts, so that genres associated with different disciplines can be explicitly taught. So, for example, scientific report writing has evolved as a genre that can be taught to ESL students heading to science majors because the expected structures that make up scientific reports, and the language that is commonly employed within this genre, has been identified.
In ELT writing classes, genre pedagogy can be used to expand the writing repertoires of students, for example, moving beyond simple descriptive or narrative writing to argumentative genres (Rose & Martin, 2011). What would this look like in the classroom then? This would see students learning the features of academic essays as a genre: Introduction > Body> Conclusion paragraphs, and the defining features of each paragraph, like thesis statements, topic sentences and cohesive devices. An argumentative essay may opt to include a more specific element that is not normally included in other academic essay forms, namely the counterargument and refutation structure. To do this, students would be asked to analyze model essays for both macro (or global) structural features as well as more micro (or local), linguistic features before using these models as guides for their own writing.
Understanding and employing Genre-based approaches to writing are vital for educators looking to better equip their students for using another language in the globalized world, as knowing what readers are expecting, and how to write for their expectations, are how students become effective communicators.
Gebhard, M., & Harman, R. (2011). Reconsidering genre theory in K-12 schools: A response to school reforms in the United States. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20, 45–55. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2010.12.007
Rose, D., & Martin, J. R. (2012). Learning to write/reading to learn: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney school. Equinox.