The implementation of genre-based tasks in foreign language writing instruction: a longitudinal study of writers' rhetorical awareness, writing quality, and lexicogrammatical choices

Abstract

The present study aimed to document the ontogenetic development of Japanese EFL writers' rhetorical awareness, writing performances, and their lexicogrammatical choices as they engaged in carefully designed genre-based tasks over one academic year. The two-semester sequence of writing courses were designed based on the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective on genre learning (Martin & Rose, 2008). Instruction also integrated the genres into tasks (Byrnes, 2006) with the guidance from task-based language teaching (TBLT) principles (Norris, 2009). A total of 30 students divided into two different proficiency levels (15 in a higher proficiency group and 15 in a lower proficiency group) participated in the study. A triangulated inquiry was employed by gathering naturalistic data from intact classes: questionnaires, interviews, free writing, teacher-researcher field notes, and pre-instructional and post-instructional writing samples produced by the students at the two different periods of each semester. Findings showed that as the students engaged in the SFL-informed genre tasks, their concerns shifted to more genre-specific rhetorical issues that could accommodate the needs of the given context. The comparisons of their pre-and post-instructional writing tasks showed that enhanced rhetorical awareness affected their actual genre production in terms of their meaning-making language choices. However, proficiency effects were markedly observed in terms of how and to what degree they were able to elaborate grammatically sophisticated expressions to realize a genre. The results suggest that improved genre awareness might enable students to expand their language choices to some extent in a way that allows them to accommodate the genre demands, although their limited language proficiency might impede the expansion of meaning-making resources at a productive level. Explaining this phenomenon based on SFL theory, it can be argued that the ability to use more incongruent and metaphorical grammatical resources may appear at a later stage of a language learning process. Some pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of the interface between a genre-based approach to writing instructions and a task-based approach to language learning.