Blog Entry # 4

Time Square, NYC: People, each of them one of a kind

Miller, D. “Promoting Genre Awareness in the EFL Classroom.” English Teaching Forum 2 Apr. 2011: 2-15. Print 

I chose this article for it is related to what we will be discussing in the class. It is also part of what I am trying to do with the project. Its emphasis is on EFL, yet I find no reason why it would not be appropriate for ESL settings. What I like about this article is, like the ones I reviewed before, that it contains first-hand experience of the writer with review of the previous works. The writer is a regional English language officer in Senegal. I can see clearly what she means as I have worked with some English language fellows back in my country. I found their outreach programs resourceful and applicable. I even had run a follow-up program after they had trained us in Mandalay, Burma aka Myanmar, in the year 2003 when activities that were carried out in collaboration with the US embassy under surveillance of the police of the regime. Teachers who came to the training sessions were constantly harassed by undercover police. Yet we managed to survive until now when things look promising in the decade-old hermitage. In short I have seen something working under such Peace Corps programs.

When it comes to talking about writing teachers and students alike tend to focus on the structure of the content and mechanics like grammar, punctuation and spelling. They do not usually discuss they way text is constructed with context and audience. In the beginning of the article is a brief explanation of what genre is and some backgrounds of genre theory. She mentions about the two schools of thought about teaching genre—the one that encourages explicit teaching and the other that supports implicit instruction. Based on what I have read in the article she seems to stand on the side of the latter. 

Her pedagogy of teaching genre is raising students’ awareness. She suggests three genre awareness activities. The first one is a five-step approach. She calls it genre and context awareness activities. The steps are explaining the different ways of writing for different purposes, having students read different types of texts, helping them define audience according to the writing that they have read, asking them to find out the purpose of the text, and getting them to think about why the texts are written in different ways. 

The second one is genre and discourse awareness activities. They involve working on three different types of text. They all have a discourse structure with a move that has a situation, a problem, a response, and an evaluation of response. The last one is optional. The steps are created to help students become aware of cohesive aspect of text and the order of sentences. Then they are asked to compare their work that they created during the previous activities. The last step is encouraging them to notice how genres are organized and to learn those patterns, which will help them become better writers. 

The next one is genre and language awareness activities. In the process students are advised to take notice of the spoken and written discourse. After getting them to get exposed to video and reading materials created according to the same topic, students are asked to compare the written and spoken texts. Then they engage in identifying different kinds of video clips or TV programs such as weather reports and complaints. They are then asked to write all the procedures that they have just seen. 

What I found useful here is that materials used are authentic and reflect the structure and organization of text they are going to deal with in their ESL/EFL learning. The possible setback could be the constraints of school curriculum and the time consuming nature of teaching writing. In order to prove it useful, this kind of awareness raising activities should be introduced to the class from time to time throughout the school calendar, and we have to bare in mind that genre is the form of writing while grammar and other mechanics are building blocks of the form itself. Giving student writers only bolts and nuts simply cannot satisfy the need, they also need to have a blueprint, which is essential in constructing a form.