While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students’ writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This article reports findings from a cross-institutional research study that examines how students access and make use of prior genre knowledge when they encounter new writing tasks in first-year composition courses. Findings reveal a range of ways student make use of prior genre knowledge, with some students breaking down their genre knowledge into useful strategies and repurposing it, and with others maintaining known genres regardless of task.
This chapter provides an overview of how genres have been associated with formal qualities of textual products, drawing on work in linguistics on text types, register, and genre that often begins with textual products and identifies formal patterns across texts; research in ESL and ESP that informs instruction in a genre by specifying the textual patterns and rhetorical moves typically seen in textual products; and work in rhetorical genre studies that has emphasized genres as typified recurrent situations rather than textual patterns. Genres are norms that develop within communities and that promote socialization of novices. The case of tax accounting genres is used to examine how writers reproduce specific genres' textual patterns within socially and culturally defined norms. The historical case of 19th century public petitioning is used to demonstrate how writers adapt existing genres to new relationships and purposes. This chapter then explains how learners acquire the norms of genres and develop genre awareness. Finally, it considers how research can address genre variation.
, where she teaches courses in writing and writing theory and English language studies. She is the author of Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland 1520-1659, articles on genre theory in College English and CCC, and two forthcoming books, a theoretical study of writing genres and a genrebased textbook for first-year writing courses (coauthored with Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff). Anis Bawarshi is assistant professor of English at the University of Washington, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. His book Genre and the Invention of the Writer (forthcoming) examines the relationship between genre and subject formation and what that relationship means for the study and teaching of writing. He has recently coedited, with Sidney I. Dobrin, A Closer Look: The Writer's Reader.
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