Foundations of Teaching Particular Genres
| The Pros and Cons of Teaching Particular Genres | |
| Pros | Cons |
| Provides students quick access to useful genres | Students receive an inauthentic learning experience without the opportunity to acquire or use genres in real-life circumstances (Freedman, 1993)[1] |
| Easy to teach because it does not require students to have contextual genre knowledge | Practically, there is not enough time in one course (or one class session) to teach all useful genres- picking which genres to teach may be an impossible task |
The process of teaching particular genres is a method undertaken to even the playing field between those who do and those who do not have the genre knowledge to participate in a particular academic discourse community. The argument goes, new college students need to know, for instance, how to be academically persuasive, so they should be taught the persuasive genre. Realistically, it is only possible to introduce a small set of situationally appropriate genres to students, which puts the pressure on the instructor to pick the “best” ones to introduce. Despite this constraint, teaching particular genres is a necessary scaffolding step that must be undertaken at some level to ultimately promote higher-level thinking in students.
Teaching particular genres is a cyclical process of genre introduction, examination, and replication. In a composition lesson plan example provided by Devitt (2014)[2], students are first asked to review a model of a genre, then identify its social function, organization structure, and linguistic features. Finally, students create their own, similarly featured text, by mimicking the original model and using its identified features.
This is a frequently used pedagogical approach to teaching students in first-year composition classes. A syllabus requiring students to learn about and write a selection of genres, such as narrative, descriptive, argumentative, and research essays likely uses the teaching particular genres pedagogical approach.
- Freedman, A. (1993). Show and tell? The role of explicit teaching in the learning of new genres. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(3), 222–251. ↵
- Devitt, A. J. (2014). Genre pedagogies. In G. Tate, A. Rupiper Taggart, K. Schick, & H. B. Hessler (Eds.), A Guide to Composition Pedagogies (2nd ed., pp. 146–162). Oxford University Press. ↵
