To 'write out of the box' - enhancing academic and professional literacies with genre pedagogy

Abstract

A major challenge for developing an English-in-the-discipline (ED) writing course for students of Social Sciences with a range of disciplinary interests is the need to fill in the vacuum resulting from the lack of thematic relevance between the English course and students’ respective disciplinary majors. In view of this, ‘Language, Genre and Reports’, one of the five ED courses for Social Sciences with a specific focus on enhancing students’ literacies in academic and professional writing, adopts a genre-based approach which enables students to write in their target contexts effectively in the world outside the ESL classroom (Hyland, 2007). The course aims to develop students’ awareness of the context, communicative purposes, contents, rhetorical structure and lexico-grammar of different report sub-genres in the Social Sciences discipline. The students are then required to pull together language, content and context in writing an investigative report of a social issue of their choice as a learning outcome. While the genre-based approach seems to allow flexibility for students to develop a sense of autonomy and independence in making choices of language and content in writing, the absence of a ‘standard template’ or ‘model sample’ seems to be a significant factor that influences students’ perceptions of the effectiveness and usefulness of the course. This paper looks at possible ways of providing scaffolding to students through collaborative construction of a “writing frame” (Richards & Lewis, 2002; Wray & Lewis, 1997) before moving on to independent writing.