Within seven weeks of training, students reflected on their English learning experience, expressed their viewpoint on English learning attitudes, and became equipped with the ability to draw on the newly acquired genre knowledge transmitted to them through workshops and genre-analysis activities. On a micro-structural level, the group writing practices allowed students to focus on linguistic features such as cohesive devices by practicing using temporal/numeration, adversative, and means-purpose conjunctives to construct their argument text on English learning. Macro-structurally, students acquired knowledge on the generic features of different text types accumulatively. They also synthesized the functions of explanation, discussion and argumentative text types in the post-test to respond to the writing prompt about their view on English learning. This was an appropriate application of using language in social context since the writing topic was relevant to the students’ academic lives. As put forth by Johns (1997), students come to read and write with confidence after they are able to use the formal characteristics of genre as a member of the international academic community. The participants demonstrated their ability to use the expected conventional features in the academic writing discourse appropriately as a member of the community. The success of the academic literacy training sessions might inspire more EFL practitioners in Taiwan to design and implement similar programs in college writing courses.
Conclusion
From an academic literacy perspective, the current study set out to first discover the current level of genre awareness for college EAP students in Taiwan, and second, test the effects of text type teaching sessions on enhancing both genre awareness and writing for the students. The results indicated an initial low level of genre awareness among participants. After training on academic text types, however, genre awareness and knowledge on text purpose, writer, audience, and source increased significantly for the experimental group. The positive effects of genre-based writing instruction on improving overall writing quality for the argument text in this study provide a template for college EFL instructors who are interested in enhancing students’ textual coherence at the macro-structural level, and fluency, structure, and cohesion at the micro-structural level of conventional academic texts. As globalization has exposed Taiwanese college students to the international academic community, how to gain recognition and membership into the community becomes an important research area for EFL educators in this locale. The findings of the study imply an urgent need for EFL practitioners in Taiwan to raise students’ genre awareness in academic writing instruction. Future research could explore the benefits of genre-based writing instruction to help students achieve long-term academic writing success.
Several limitations from this study could be avoided in future investigations. First, the duration of the training sessions only lasted seven weeks in total. Although the study produced significant results, both we the researchers and the participants would prefer an extension of the treatment to have a more solid understanding and practice on the target text-types. Second, there was only one post-test immediately after the teaching. To ensure treatment validity, a follow-up post-test could take place a few weeks after the workshop to see if students indeed were able to retain and apply the genre knowledge acquired from the seven weeks experimental design. For improving curriculum design, the brief exploration on textual organization and lexico-grammatical
features employed in this study could be developed into more in-depth lessons spread out in a longer training period for more desirable learning outcomes and lasting effects.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. The financial supports from National Science Council and English Eagle Project of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan are gratefully acknowledged.
DOI: 10.3966/102887082013065902004
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