Genre-based approach to writing instruction for students at English Language and Literature department

Being aware of their students' needs is very crucial for teachers because students need to accomplish tasks within their respective disciplines and subject areas. The aim of the genre-based pedagogy is to focus on students' academic needs and enable them to read and write successfully (Martin, 1993, 2009). Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to understand the range of written genres and other writing skills that students need to use in their academic studies. In order to achieve this aim genre-based writing instruction suggests a systematic and explicit way of teaching writing. Genre-based pedagogy together with the analysis of students' needs might function as a basis for curriculum design to have effective and positive results from writing education. An analysis of student needs is generally considered crucial in developing appropriate course design and content; such an analysis using genre-based writing instruction in ESP based course design should also be regarded as a building block of teaching writing. Learning and teaching in ESP genre-oriented writing pedagogy can provide a lot of advantages and convenience to both students and teachers in many ways. For instance, critical awareness of writing practices, suitable discipline-specific texts for students and how writers organize texts can be listed to employ and manipulate this type of writing instruction and "to meet the anticipated goal and purpose" (Kay & Dudley-Evans, 1998). The present study attempts to investigate the process of building metacognitive genre-awareness within genre-based academic writing instruction and show how it influences English Language and Literature students' ability to interpret and compose academic texts. Moreover, by applying a genre-based writing syllabus for literature students, the researcher aims to focus on the effects of this approach on students' interpersonal relationship with the teacher, their attitudes and motivation towards writing and achievement in academic writing. The present study is designed as a case study and both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis have been adopted. For this reason, multiple tools of data collection have been employed in this study (Silverman, 2000): classroom observation, students' written texts (portfolios), interview with the students, teacher's journal, students' diaries, questionnaires and students' writing exam scores. Research has been conducted with 110 undergraduate students who have attended the first year of English Language and Literature Department at Gaziantep University during 2014 – 2015 academic year. It aims to reveal whether genre-based academic writing instruction contributes raising metacognitive genre awareness in English Language and Literature students, how this metacognitive genre awareness affects the students' analysis of academic and literary texts and how it affects their writing performance. Keywords: Genre-based academic writing instruction, metacognitive genre awareness, analysis of academic and literary texts, and motivation and attitudes towards writing