8.3 A Genre-Based Approach

8.3 A Genre-Based Approach

One way to support students' writing development in science or other disciplines is the Sydney School Genre-Based Pedagogy, or SGP (Rose & Martin, 2012), first introduced in Chapter 3. The pedagogy was initially developed in Australia as a response to the prevalence of a process approach that emphasizes the planning-drafting-composing-revising-editing-publishing framework. It focuses on the linguistic resources students need to write effective and powerful texts, offering explicit, systematic explanations of how language choices present information, embed perspective, develop argument, and structure text in ways that are specific to particular genres, disciplines, or contexts. It foregrounds the role of teachers as more knowledgeable others in providing linguistic support to students in ways that raise their awareness and understanding of how and why a text means what it means and why a text is more or less effective for its own purpose. Hyland (2007, p. 150) identified seven salient features of SGP as follows:

·　Explicit: makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of writing skills

·　Systematic: provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language and contexts

·　Needs-based: ensures that course objectives and content are derived from students' needs

·　Supportive: gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students' learning and creativity

·　Empowering: provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valued texts(https://www.daowen.com)

·　Critical: provides the resources for students to understand and challenge valued discourses

·　Consciousness-raising: increases teachers' awareness of texts to confidently advise students on writing

SGP can be implemented in four phases: (1) establishing the context, (2) modeling the text, (3) guided practice, and (4) independent construction. In the first phase, students develop shared understandings about a curriculum topic or field of study through extensive reading and discussion of relevant texts and engagement with other discipline-specific activities such as observation, experiment, and field trip. The experience provides students with opportunities to build content knowledge and use discipline-specific language in contextualized ways. Several tasks are involved in this phase. These include (a) identifying major understandings and abilities to be developed in the unit; (b) deciding which genre (s) is/are appropriate for developing these abilities and understandings; (c) collecting sample texts in the chosen genre around a focal topic or issue; and (d) planning activities to familiarize students with the topic and immerse them in the target genre.

In the second phase, at least one mentor text in the target genre is identified for deconstruction. This involves discussing the purpose of the text and how it is achieved through generic text structure and lexicogrammatical choices, rereading the text to clarify understanding, reading closely of carefully selected excerpts from the text, highlighting key or unfamiliar vocabulary, unpacking dense phrases or complex sentences, comparing the text to other texts belonging to the same genre, and contrasting the purpose and structure of the text with those of a different genre. It is in this phase that metalanguage terms are introduced to help students identify, describe, and interpret how grammatical choices work in the text.

In the third phase, the teacher and students construct a text in the target genre together, with the teacher acting as a scribe, writing and, when necessary, rewording students' contributions on the board. Using the metalanguage and genre knowledge developed in the previous phase, the teacher guides students to construct a new text through prompts, questions, suggestions, and modeling. Once students are confident enough about the structural and linguistic characteristics of the genre, they then move to the final phase, when they write independently with minimal teacher support, incorporating and recontextualizing the language resources that are appropriate for the genre in the process of designing, composing, and publishing their own texts.