Genre has become an increasingly important concept in second language writing, and genre-based pedagogies have become core to the second language writing classroom, but many instructors who are unfamiliar with or new to genre-based approaches to writing instruction may lack the necessary confidence to get started in adopting a genre-based approach. They may feel uncertain about which genres to teach and what to focus instruction on (Tardy et al., 2022), as well as how to get started. In this article, I provide a few ideas for getting started with genre-based pedagogy.

Getting Comfortable With Genre Analysis

One way that teachers can begin to become comfortable with genre-based approaches is by practicing analysis of genres themselves. Johns (1997) has recommended this as an approach for introducing genre to students, but it’s useful for teachers to examine “everyday genres,” too. Gathering and reviewing a few examples of a familiar genre can help beginners to genre analysis get started.

To do this, select a genre you are familiar with and interested in exploring (e.g., book reviews, food or travel blogs, Twitter posts, anything really). Then, gather a few samples of these. Read the samples through a few times and ask yourself about the context; the purpose(s); and typical organizational, language, and formatting features of these samples, as well as elements that might make some of them unique. Congratulations! You’ve just conducted basic genre analysis.

Though this is, perhaps, an oversimplification of more sophisticated processes of genre analysis, it is a good start. What you have to keep in mind is that genres are not static, and they vary. That can be frustrating when you’re trying to see what a set of examples has in common, but the more you become familiar with a genre, the easier it becomes to see what a prototypical feature might be and what might be unique in an example text.

Becoming Familiar With Aspects of Genre-Based Pedagogy

After trying your hand at genre analysis of a familiar genre, think about how you could apply this in the classroom. Following are the primary aims of genre-based writing instruction:

Aims of Genre-Based Writing Instruction

• Genre awareness: Raise students’ awareness of how genres work.

• Genre-specific knowledge: Raise students’ awareness of the contexts, purposes, conventions, and linguistic resources employed in genres.

• Scaffolding: Scaffold instruction to walk students through the collaborative and independent production of target genres.

Genre-based writing instruction typically uses tasks and activities that work toward these aims. These tasks and activities might focus on, for example,

• discussion around the context, audience, and purposes of a target genre;
• guided inductive analysis of samples of the genre;
• teacher modelling;
• collaborative writing; and
• the writing, drafting, and review processes of independent production.

These tasks are often staged and sequenced following the teaching-learning cycle. There are several great resources available to teachers to become familiar with genre-based writing instructional strategies, but Tardy has written a particularly reader friendly and very affordable one called Genre-Based Writing: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know.

In the Classroom

After you have explored a familiar genre and some typical genre-based tasks and activities, you can try a genre-based task in the classroom. Though many books and resources focused on genre-based pedagogy recommend adopting a genre-based approach to overall course or assignment design, you might want to start out by trying one genre-based task.

Incorporate genre-based activities in small ways, for example, with a think-pair-share activity in which students examine samples of a genre to identify what they think might be the context and audience of the target genre or by having them gather and examine examples of a genre they would like to learn more about or from their own area of study/major. This actively engages students with genres that will be of relevance and interest to them. See a few more examples of tasks and activities available on the TESOL blog by Betsy Gilliland and Elena Schvidko.

Reflect

Reflecting on your teaching is just good practice, but it’s especially important when you’re trying something new out. You might consider what went well, what did not go well, and what you would like to change. You could also reflect on how your own understandings of genre and genre-based pedagogy have evolved. Finally, you may well want to think forward to what you would like to do next with genre-based pedagogy—a full assignment or course redesign, perhaps. You might also want to think about leaning on colleagues and critical friends with whom you can share your experiences, concerns, and reflections.

The ideas I offer here are not new. However, for instructors who are genre curious but do not feel confident in getting started, I hope this article has offered some encouragement, food for thought, and a way into genre-based pedagogy.

References

Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role, and context. Cambridge University Press.

Tardy, C. M., Hall Buck, R., Jacobson, B., LaMance, R., Pawlowski, M., Slinkard, J. R., & Vogel, S. M. (2022). “It's complicated and nuanced”: Teaching genre awareness in English for general academic purposes. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101117

Angela Hakim is a global professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she teaches International Foundations Writing. Her research focuses on genre-based writing instruction, academic literacy support in higher education, English for academic purposes, and English medium instruction.