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.