Explicitly Teaching Five Technical Genres to English First-Language Adults in a Multi-Major Technical Writing Course

Abstract

My research focuses on students who speak English as their first language and are currently enrolled in a technical writing class open to students from many majors. I will report in this post on the outcomes of teaching these students five distinct types of technical writing. In this case, the students in issue have English as their mother tongue. Previous experimental research has shown that it is useful to explicitly teach academic writing to adults who speak English as their first language. The findings of the research have proved this.
 In contrast, no research on technical writing has ever been conducted compared to this study's level of depth and breadth. In order to investigate these effects, I employed a strategy that included a few different research approaches. In order to present a more comprehensive, in-depth characterization of the 534 texts authored by 316 student authors, this approach consisted of a control-group quasi-experimental design with a qualitative analysis. These were the components that made up the strategy. According to the findings, the participants in the genre workshop created writings with a significantly higher sensitivity to audience, purpose, structure, design, style, and editing than those generated by participants who were taught using more traditional approaches. Participants displayed a superior awareness of audience, aim, and editing while working within the framework of technical genres in the job materials text type instead of the procedures text type. This was the case when comparing the two text types. When contrasting the two different forms of text, this was the result.