Facilitating writing from sources: A focus on both process and product

Abstract

This paper reflects on and theorises the experience of developing a postgraduate core subject in EAP, exploring the role of both genre awareness and process management in facilitating writing from sources. Reflection on our initial genre-based pedagogies indicated that teaching the literature review to coursework students was not appropriate, and that teaching genre sets and genre awareness did not adequately facilitate writing from sources. Our current pedagogies constitute a set of genuinely interlocking tasks oriented around the writing of a single genre (a literature-based information report). The recursive processes of organising, selecting and integrating information are promoted through the use of graphic organisers in classroom activities and assessment tasks, and there is evidence of significant improvement in several aspects of students' writing. These pedagogies are theorised via sociocognitive theories of reading-writing processes that focus on the generation and transformation of meaning in specific communicative contexts, and do not contradict the principles of genre-based approaches. I argue that the notion of process, denigrated by genre theorists, be recuperated, and that the management of processes be taught in tandem with genre awareness to address the full range of students' reading-writing needs.