This article reports partial results of a qualitative study which explored the gains and challenges encountered by two groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers from a public university in Medellin, Colombia, in developing a situated view of academic writing through a systemic functional genre-based instructional unit. The unit was part of a written communications course and used an approach called the teaching-learning cycle. Results from the study suggest that one of the main gains was related to pre-service teachers' emerging understanding of context, purpose, and audience. One of the main challenges concerned pre-service teachers' difficulty with shifting their former views of grammar as a fixed system of rules.

This article presents the results of a qualitative research study that aimed to explore the benefits of implementing a Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) genre-based approach to help a group of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers write the statement of the problem section of their research proposals. The implementation comprised a series of writing workshops and individual tutoring sessions with students designed following the principles of the SFL genre-based curriculum cycle. To gain better insights into the benefits of this approach, the workshop sessions, the individual tutoring sessions, and the individual student interviews were audio-recorded. In addition, samples of students’ drafts and final texts were collected and analyzed. The findings show that the approach has the potential to enhance students’ awareness of how to structure arguments in the statement of the problem section of their research proposal. Students also improved their ability to elaborate on each argument that they put forward throughout the section.