Foundations of Teaching Genre Awareness
“If genres are a response to context, can they be learned out of context?”
Freedman, 1993, p. 194[1]
If you are working with advanced students or you have the opportunity to scaffold your teaching, you will likely find the opportunity to teach genre awareness. This pedagogical approach provides for a richer understanding of the academic and popular genres students will likely face in their discourse communities. Although you may consider this method “better” than teaching particular genres, it is important to note using the first model is the best place to start with a group of novice students.
Devitt (2014)[2] defined genre awareness as a method of teaching genre which clarifies how to contextually understand and access any genre, rather than explicitly recognize a few instructor-chosen ones. In this method, the instructor pulls back the curtain to introduce students to the complex concept of genre itself.
Devitt’s (2014) sample composition lesson plan for teaching genre awareness involves:
- Students reviewing various genre samples,
- Students identifying the rhetorical and contextual situations related to those samples,
- Students identifying the patterns associated with those genres, and
- Students analyzing the identified patterns in relation to their generic contexts.
When teaching particular genres, students conclude their lesson with useful but finite knowledge about one genre. In this pedagogy, students are taught a method of analysis helping them to transfer their thinking from one genre to the next, with the expert ultimately able to deconstruct any genre encountered.
- 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. ↵
