Genre Pedagogy and Bilingual Graduate Students’ Academic Writing

Abstract

Genre pedagogy plays an important role in helping graduate students to enter the discourse community of their fields. Although familiarity with research genres benefits graduate students, few studies have explored the influences of instruction on learners’ subsequent generic practices. In this study, we describe the genre-based approach used in a bilingual (English and Spanish) Applied Linguistics graduate course, which aimed to enhance students’ research genre awareness to allow them to be better able to confront their own work as investigators. The description of the course is followed by a study to determine if and how a research article discourse analysis task influenced the students’ academic writing in their own papers. Our research question was the following: To what extent can course instruction influence students’ academic writing? The study entails a survey to elicit students’ perspectives on the influence of the course and its tasks on their academic writing, as well as teachers’ comments on the students’ written work. Although learning to do research at the graduate level requires a broad range of competencies that go beyond genre awareness, the findings from the survey confirmed the positive effects of genre knowledge gains in accomplishing further research goals.

The Impact of Genre-Based Instruction on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Writing Skills

“…The findings of a study conducted by Morell and Cesteros (2019) confirmed that GBI of writing positively affects genre knowledge and genre awareness of bilingual applied linguistic students. In a qualitative study, Allen and Goodspeed (2018) employed GBI pedagogy and approved that GBI pedagogy facilitated the literacy development of 19 advanced collegiate learners of French writing courses.…”

Perceived Challenges to Anglophone Publication at Three Universities in Chile

“…In his study of Taiwanese graduate students, Huang argues for a Swalesian genre-based research writing course for all of them [7]. Morell and Cesteros describe the benefits of their bilingual (Spanish and English) course on genre awareness for increasing their students' research skills [32].…”

“…In any case, the genre of Anglophone research articles can certainly be taught, as many applied linguists advocate at even the graduate level, thereby underlining its importance [7,15,32] and probably with less difficulty than linguistic competence. Swalesian templates are taught widely, as explained in the Literature Review-but not at the universities surveyed in our study.…”

“…Swalesian templates are taught widely, as explained in the Literature Review-but not at the universities surveyed in our study. Other mentors of researchers advocate studying the structure and linguistic features of articles in target journals, especially if one wishes to publish in Spanish or other native languages [32,34].…”

Editorial: Publishing Research Internationally: Multilingual Perspectives from Research and Practice

“…In an effort to redress the imbalance that often results from an emphasis on acquiring ERPP skills, namely a skill deficit in the writer's other languages, Teresa Morell and Susana Pastor Cesteros designed and implemented a bilingual (English and Spanish), genre-based research writing course for Applied Linguistics graduates at the University of Alicante, Spain. In their paper, Genre Pedagogy and Bilingual Graduate Students' Academic Writing [15], Morell and Pastor-Cesteros look into the potential transfer of gained genre competence in one language to another language, in this case English to Spanish, through bilingual instruction. They provide an account of course participants' responses to a questionnaire and suggest that genre awareness facilitates a range of research competencies crucial to the accomplishment of further research goals leading to publication in either language.…”