Theory and Writing: Genre

Key Points: This week we read about teaching genre writing. Interestingly, right now I'm writing within a specific genre. The way I'm writing this blog post, as in my rhetoric, level of familiarity, vocabulary, omission of bad words, can be considered a genre. Teaching L2 writers about genres may help them become better writers.

There are two main approaches to using genres to teach L2 writers. The first looks at the lingual building blocks that are specific to each genre. The Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and the English for Specific Purposes follow this method. This approach is ideal for the classroom. It comes with a step by step method and makes writing less daunting by providing some framework.

The second approach is to make students aware of the process of genre writing and is inspired by the New Rhetoric School. This school of thought states that genres change according to context and cannot be understood by simply examining example texts and coming up with frameworks to write within. However, being aware of the nature of genre writing will help the L2 writers become better writers.

Ideally, teachers will incorporate both schools of thought when teaching genre writing. The benefits of teaching genre writing can be seen in the studies conducted by S. Yasuda and G. Myskow & K. Gordon. S. Yasuda combined genre writing and task based learning in a study show proof of improvement. The study was based in SFL and showed that students improved in rhetorical awareness. In the Myskow & K. Gordon paper, the reader learns how a lesson in genre that follows the other approach, New Rhetoric School. In this lesson, the students examine one very specific genre of writing, Japanese University application letters, in order to learn the importance of process and context in genre writing.

Mu interaction with the articles:

While reading these articles I tried to remember how I was taught writing. It's a little fuzzy except for one very clear example of genre instruction that has been burned into my soul, and that is the five paragraph essay. There were two Florida administered essay tests that I had to take in middle school that determined my academic future. In my Korean studies, I've introduced myself many times to hypothetical strangers and applied for a hypothetical job by listing my skills and hobbies.

It seemed that genre writing instruction for L2 writing is not much different for L1 writing. So I'm going to apply my history with genre writing to form two personal opinions. First, learning to write the five paragraph essay without learning why and it ruined my writing. I tried to use the five paragraph format for everything I wrote. It never crossed my mind that there was any other format. My second opinion comes from trying to write in Korean. I feel that there is an ideal order for learning genres. Beginners benefit from the strict forms and talking about the context or variations at that point will make writing more difficult.

S. Yasuda's study was half genre writing and half task based. I felt that genre writing got an unfair amount of attention in the reading. The study did a better job selling task based teaching than it did genre writing. I feel the genre study may have been a little restrictive, while the task based instruction was very effective.

Myskow & K. Gordon's example lesson was thorough but inefficient. To site myself as an example, studying one genre too much too early in your writing career can be bad. This isn't genre teaching. The word genre implies that other genres exist. Like me, these students may be confused when it comes time to write in different genres because they will relate all writing to the genre they studied the most. They also may be scared to write again if they think that it will take that much research to write.