Reconsidering genre theory in K-12 schools: A response to school reforms in the United States

Using a Systemic Functional Genre-Based Approach to Promote a Situated View of Academic Writing Among EFL Pre-service Teachers

“…To help learners with this task, SFL genre-based scholars have created "a schema for sequencing tasks leading students to write in various genres on their own" (Hyon, 1996, p. 713). Such a schema has been given different names among which is the teaching-learning cycle (Gebhard & Harman, 2011;Macken-Horarik, 2002;Martin, 2009). The next section provides a brief overview of the main foci, goals, and stages of this cycle.…”

“…According to Gebhard and Harman (2011), its main goal is "to expand students' meaning-making repertoires by providing them with models, explicit instruction, and critical analyses of authors' and their own semiotic choices as they learn to interpret and produce academic texts in school" (p. 49). The model draws mainly on Halliday and Vygotsky (Hyland, 2003).…”

“…Unfortunately, in many of these courses, teachers often take a cognitive (Johns, 1997;Silva & Matsuda, 2002) as opposed to a situated sociocultural approach (Gebhard & Harman, 2011;Hyland, 2003Hyland, , 2004Johns, 2002;Martin, 2009). That is, they encourage learners to see academic writing as a fixed activity the structure, grammar, and lexical forms of which are unchangeable across different contexts, purposes, and audiences (Johns, 2011).…”

“…The setting for the study was a level two Written Communications course taught by two of the team members, Tatiana and Sofía. 1 To teach the course, the teacher educators used a particular model proposed by SFL genre-based scholars (Butt et al, 2000;Derewianka, 2004;Gebhard & Harman, 2011;Martin, 2009;Schleppegrell, 2004; among others) called the teaching-learning cycle (Gebhard & Harman, 2011;Macken-Horarik, 2002;Martin, 2009), the curriculum cycle (Derewianka, 2004), or the genre-based cycle (Feez, 2002). The purpose of this article is to report on one of the main gains and one of the main challenges the pre-service teachers encountered in developing a situated view of academic writing through the use of this particular model.…”

The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts in the United States and teaching English language learners: Focus on writing

“…English language learners may have had different opportunities to engage in writing of the different text types in CCSS. Some research has suggested that personal narrative is a familiar text type for students since elementary school (Christie & Derewianka, 2010;Gebhard & Harman, 2011). In particular, teachers of ELLs may not address various text types, instead defaulting to the simplest, personal narrative (Johns, 1999).…”