Training Future Teachers in Genre Pedagogy: Does it Improve their Written Texts?

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing interest in studying the factors affecting the development of academic writing competences of university students in different disciplinary areas. Less attention, however, has been devoted to the influence on this phenomenon of the specialised training students receive, even in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher training programmes where models of writing development are analysed and implemented. In this paper we measure the effect on the writing of 22 students in the Bachelor´s Degree in Primary Education of the knowledge of the genre pedagogy in the Reading to Learn model, based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. For this purpose, two groups of students in the subject Spanish Language Didactics wrote a descriptive report or an anecdote before and after a didactic intervention. From the 82 participants, texts by 11 from each group were selected. The 44 texts were evaluated by applying a scoring scheme with 8 items (rated from 1 to 4) covering features from genre to clause level, following the field, tenor and mode components established by Systemic Functional Linguistics. The statistical study shows post-intervention improvements in all the variables analysed. The Wilcoxon test shows these were significant for the narrative texts (TN1: 23.36; TN2: 30.91), but not for the informative ones (TED1: 25.20; TED 32:26).