A Dozen Heads Are Better Than One: Collaborative Writing in Genre‐Based Pedagogy

Abstract

Organizing writing instruction around genres rather than rhetorical modes can be a highly effective and engaging preparation for students' academic and professional writing needs. The teaching/learning cycle (TLC) is a highly scaffolded curriculum model for teaching target written genres. In the TLC, the organization of and linguistic choices in a genre are made explicit to learners through analysis of mentor texts (deconstruction), following which teachers and students together compose a new text in the target genre (joint construction), and only then do students write their own texts (independent construction). The authors describe how they implemented the TLC in a high‐intermediate intensive course in English as a second language by redesigning traditional five‐paragraph essay assignments into meaningful genre instruction. Examples discussed include online product reviews, professional emails, and restaurant reviews. The key stage of the TLC, teacher‐led, whole‐class collaborative writing, is shown to promote the development of language and writing skills by making linguistic, rhetorical, and strategic choices visible. As a result, students appear to internalize language they have negotiated in the joint construction and transfer their learning to subsequent independent writing. The authors conclude with implications of genre‐based pedagogy for writing instruction in different educational contexts.