Development of graduate students’ academic writing abilities through genre-based instruction

Abstract

In universities in Iran, postgraduate students in English and Applied Linguistics are required to produce assignments and theses in English. This requirement is challenging for second language (L2) student writers who have had few opportunities to use English in authentic communicative contexts, especially since classroom instruction usually provides little in the way of explicit information about the structure and language of the genres that students will need to produce. The current study aimed to explore postgraduate students' writing needs in Iran, and the progress of their learning of disciplinary genre conventions after a course of explicit instruction. It was an action research study in which six students and five supervisors in the field of Applied Linguistics participated in needs analysis sessions, after which the students completed a writing course of 27 hours over a period of four months. At the needs analysis stage, the views of students and their supervisors about the academic writing experiences and challenges of the graduate students were gathered using questionnaires and interviews. A pre-test assessed graduate students' entry-level of genre knowledge of the Introduction and Discussion sections of research reports. A course of instruction was then provided by the researcher on how to organise the structure and language of these two sections. Three assessment instruments, comprising assignments, post-tests, and students' theses, were used to gather evidence of students' genre learning after the unit of instruction. Qualitative analysis of students' texts showed clear progress with regard to students' abilities to analyse and compose the Introduction and Discussion sections. Analysis abilities were developed at three levels of identification, description, and evaluation of genre elements, including structural patterns, communicative purposes, language elements, and reader-write interactions. With regard to students' genre performance, the number and quality of the rhetorical components of the Introductions and Discussions increased. Students were able to contextualise the planned study within the literature with reference to the CARS model (Swales, 1990, 2004). Their Discussions comprised three main conventional moves: background, a summary of the results, and evaluation of the study's findings in which students compared research results with the relevant literature and commented on the significance of findings. The results confirm the view that explicit genre-based instruction assists novice writers to develop an academic reading literacy with regard to analysis and evaluation of disciplinary texts. It also helps their writing abilities to progress to compose important academic texts with reference to disciplinary writing conventions. The findings of this study might provide valuable insight to instructors, material designers, course developers, and teacher educators in the field of advanced academic writing.