s Miller's article "Genre as Social Action" (1984/1994) launched a new field of inquiry, most aptly named rhetorical genre studies (RGS). Her reconceptualization of genre did more than illuminate a heretofore neglected area of composition studies; it cast a new light on all the central issues of writing theory and pedagogy. This commentary focuses on key strands in this rethinking of genre and composition, with the aim of highlighting those elements with implications for teaching and learning. My concern is not to propose a new pedagogy deriving from RGS but rather to point to issues that should form part of the frame or theoretic context within which teachers who have experience within the relevant learning contexts can select or invent appropriate strategies and approaches.

Drawing primarily on theories of situated learning, this study compares novices learning written genres in two different institutional settings within similar disciplines: university students in public administration courses and graduate student interns placed in government agencies. Observational and textual analyses of novices learning to write the genres necessary for these settings point to differences in writing goals, guide-learner roles, text evaluations, and learning sites. The results show that when students move from the university to the workplace, they not only have to learn new genres but they need to learn new ways to learn these new genres.

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We know relatively little about how well students succeed in mastering different modes or genres in their writing. There are a limited number of research studies which focus on very specific aspects of the writingsyntactic complexity, in particularbut most of our evidence comes from impressionistic comments made by teachers or markers (or even, in times like the present, by politicians or newspaper editorialists). A typical teacher's complaint about student writing in the intermediate grades, for example, is that students can write stories well enough, but 'they just can't write arguments'. Precisely what it is that students cannot do in argumentation or can do in narration, however, is never defined.In a recent study, therefore, we tried to find out what the real problem is.

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