Moving Away from the Implicit Teaching of Genres in the L2 Classroom

Abstract

English language proficiency exams are often associated with high-stakes decisions. Guidance however, concerning the writing tasks is often implicit. The emphasis is usually placed upon grammatical and lexical features rather than the pragmatic aspects that differentiate the tasks. Aiming to boost genre awareness as part of L2 pragmatic competence in this context the present paper provides a description of individual exam genres and their relations to each other. Such knowledge is expected to assist both teaching and material writing. Using a pedagogical genre-based corpus with model answers from teaching material we contrast eight genres to each other based on a set of sixteen features. Each feature is associated with a specific text property. Findings reveal some unexpected relations between pairs of genres and offer insight as to the points of convergence and divergence. It is shown that assumptions made about the similarity of texts which belong to the same text type group can sometimes be mistaken. Therefore, it is argued that the tendency to use general labels for text categories in teaching material may mislead novice writers.