Awareness or Acquisition? Optimizing Genre-Based Writing Instruction for Post-Secondary L2 Writers
As English-medium universities grow increasingly multilingual, literacies support for domestic students and English language support for L2 writers become more and more enmeshed. Genre-based pedagogy is a common, and appropriate, approach to meeting these writers’ needs. However, little empirical...
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| Format: | Dissertation (University of Nottingham only) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2017
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48010/ |
| Summary: | As English-medium universities grow increasingly multilingual, literacies support for
domestic students and English language support for L2 writers become more and
more enmeshed. Genre-based pedagogy is a common, and appropriate, approach to
meeting these writers’ needs. However, little empirical research has been conducted
on the effectiveness of genre-based writing instruction in post-secondary classrooms
serving non-native English speakers. A survey of 20 studies on undergraduate and
postgraduate L2 writers establishes that rhetorical awareness-raising, explicit
instruction, and task play recurring and contested roles in determining learner
outcomes. Although these topics align with key theoretical issues in second language
acquisition, analysis suggests that developing expertise in understanding and
handling genres may not happen in the same way as learning a language. Genrebased
teaching methods may thus need to take additional care to make sure that the
language learning needs of L2 writers are not overlooked. Three sets of learning
materials demonstrate the author’s way of integrating these insights into traditional
genre-based teaching approaches. |
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