Speaker
Description
This poster investigates effective teaching of genre-based reading and writing courses in universities courses and its impact on student empowerment.
The Foundational Literacies course exposes students to a variety of genres, all of which will be important in their future lives, such as information reports, academic essays, emails (especially formal emails to teachers/future employers), narratives, and procedural Texts (tour guides, recipes…etc).
This poster examines Johns (2008)'s differentiation between 'genre acquisition' (where the focus is on students' ability to replicate a type of text, often using a template, in a structured and predictable manner) and 'genre awareness' (which cultivates the rhetorical adaptability needed for continually changing contexts), noting a strong current emphasis on the former. While genre acquisition centers on "training," genre awareness leans towards "education," which Johns argues is the preferable objective. Yet, Johns acknowledges the difficulties in crafting a course that fosters genre awareness. In this presentation, I will discuss an approach designed to achieve this goal. The presentation will detail the course's framework and its goals, showcase a sample activity, and share student work and reflections to illustrate progress toward achieving genre awareness. The goal is to encourage discussion among educators and inspire them to adopt similar methods in their teaching practices.
