Introducing Genre into Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language: Toward a Genre-Specific Approach to Elementary/Intermediate Writing

Abstract

Despite the social turn in views of language and the increasing attention to an application of genre theory in teaching languages, the field of Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) has not yet found genre a valuable resource for approaching learners’ writing ability. Writing is still practiced as a psycholinguistic space to check learners’ understanding of grammar structures and kanji, and writing assignment prompts are often designed to fit into the corresponding grammatical units. Part I of this paper, by employing a functional linguistics-oriented genre theory, maps elementary/intermediate JFL grammatical units into register, which is the primary contextual parameters that construe social meanings, and illustrates the process of transferring grammatical resources into genre so that language instructors can make their own model texts and can approach their learners’ writing from a genre-specific perspective. Part II of this paper illustrates a practical implementation as the form of pedagogic report. It illustrates how the constructed model text was used in an actual JFL classroom and argues its potential for a curricular context. In essence, the present study intends to lay the groundwork for creating an applicable genre approach in a JFL curriculum that contextualizes elementary/intermediate learners’ writing as a way to represent their social views.