Genre-Based Approach to Writing Instruction for Students at an English Language and Literature Department

Abstract

The aim of the genre-based pedagogy is to focus on students’ academic needs and enable them to readand write successfully (Martin, 1993, 2009). Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to understand therange of written genres and other writing skills that students need to use in their academic studies. Thisstudy has aimed to design an alternative and effective way of teaching writing to English Language andLiterature students within the genre-based pedagogy considering their academic needs. The presentstudy attempts to investigate the process of building metacognitive genre-awareness and show how itinfluences English Language and Literature students’ ability to interpret and compose academic texts.The present study is designed as a case study, and mixed methods of data collection and analysis havebeen adopted. Several sources of data coming from both the teacher herself and the students such asclassroom observation and teacher’s journal, students’ written texts (portfolios), students’ diaries andinterview with students have been used to have a deeper understanding of the process of genre-basedwriting instruction. The results of the study indicate that most of the students acquired, at least,metacognitive awareness of the declarative type, they seem to move their writing ability up and there isa general improvement in their writing performance.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).