Transferring generic features and recontextualizing genre awareness: Understanding writing performance in the ESP genre-based literacy framework

Abstract

Despite the impact of the ESP genre-based framework of teaching discipline-specific writing to L2 learners, especially to L2 graduate students, the writing performance of learners in such a framework is still not fully explored. In this paper, I analyze three article introductions written by a Chinese-speaking graduate student in electrical engineering. My analysis of the student’s writing samples, his annotations of his writing, his literacy narrative, and the interview transcript suggests that the student was able to transfer some previously noticed generic features into his writing. More important, his deployment of these features was motivated by various rhetorical considerations, as evidenced in his efforts to fulfill multiple purposes and to create certain projected reader responses through the rhetorical (re)organization in his writing. Based on the analysis, I argue that the significance of genre-based learning can be captured more fully through observing how learners recontextualize their genre awareness in their writing. Consequently, the goal of genre-based learning may be more productively conceptualized not only as the development of the awareness of genres, i.e., the awareness of generic features, but also the development of the awareness of genre, i.e., the increasingly sophisticated awareness of the rhetorical considerations motivating the generic features.