The trends that we see both in official guidelines and school practices demonstrate a shift towards formative assessment strategies with an emphasis on feed-forward comments to the students. How this is carried out in schools varies, and the material in this study shows signs of changing evaluation practices in English instruction. One of the changes is an increased tendency to use process-oriented approaches to feedback, in which the students work through a draft several times before handing in a final product. Much of what is commented on in the feedback focuses on how ideas are organised and how the text is structured. Though process writing is a familiar concept from first language writing instruction, the specific focus on genre requirements in the feedback process makes this a somewhat different type of process-writing, similar to what we find in the genre-pedagogy tradition developed in Australia. The English teachers in this study who report working in this way combine process-writing with explicit instruction in genre requirements. This study explores current feedback practices, and illustrates how process-oriented feedback practices may be combined with writing instruction in a genre-pedagogy approach to writing to support students’ writing.

In the tradition of teaching English as a second language, there has been an increased interest in how functional language descriptions and understandings of genres may be used as resources for making meaning. The present study investigates what impact writing instruction that draws upon systemic functional linguistics (SFL) applied through a genre-pedagogy approach has on students' ability to write argumentative essays. This includes explicit grammar instruction inspired by SFL, as well as instruction on text structure. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, with a quasiexperiment followed up by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected material. Statistical analyses indicate a significant positive effect on writing performance in the intervention groups, regardless of gender, first language and previous level of writing. As the study lacks control groups, the quantitative analysis was complemented with examples from student texts to illustrate the improvement revealed in the statistical analysis. The findings suggest that SFL applied through a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching writing may help students to improve their writing skills.

This article presents a study of current English writing instruction practices in a selection of Norwegian upper secondary schools and discusses how this draws upon ideas within genre-pedagogy. The data comprises individual and focus-group interviews, observation reports and some teaching material. The study shows that English teachers focus on teaching genre requirements and adjustment of language to task and context. However, despite agreeing on the importance of teaching how to write specific text-types and to adjust to the situation at hand, there seems to be different opinions about how detailed instruction should be. Some teachers fear that too explicit instruction may hinder creativity, while others emphasise the need to learn how to structure a text, and to open up for creativity within certain writing frames. In spite of the differences, the practices revealed in this study comply quite well with genre-pedagogy. From the findings in this article, it seems like there is a need to develop and make available teaching material in English to be used in writing instruction, and also to improve the English teacher education with regard to the teaching of writing.Keywords: Writing instruction, genre-pedagogy, teaching-learning cycle, con-text and modellingSammendragDenne artikkelen presenterer en studie av engelsk skriveundervisning i et utvalg norske videregående skoler, og diskuterer hvordan disse praksisene samsvarer med sjangerpedagogikk. Innsamlet data består av individuelle og fokusgruppe-intervjuer, observasjonsrapporter og undervisningsmateriale, og studien viser at engelsklærere fokuserer på å undervise sjangerkrav og det å tilpasse språk til oppgave og kontekst. Til tross for at det er enighet om at det er viktig å undervise i spesifikke tekst typer, og det å tilpasse skriving til situasjon, er det ulike meninger om hvor detaljert skriveundervisningen bør være. Noen lærere frykter at for eksplisitt instruksjon kan hindre kreativitet, mens andre understreker behovet for å lære å strukturere tekster i detalj, og åpner opp for kreativitet innen bestemte skriverammer. Til tross for ulikheter, så samsvarer praksisene presentert i denne studien i stor grad med sjangerpedagogikken. Ut fra funnene i denne artikkelen, kan en konkludere at det er et behov for å utvikle og gjøre tilgjengelig undervisningsmateriale for skriveundervisning i engelsk, samt at det er et behov for å forbedre engelsklærerutdanningen når det gjelder opplæring i skriveundervisning.Nøkkelord: Skriveundervisning, sjangerpedagogikk, undervisnings-lærings syklus, kontekst og modellering

This study set out to investigate how teachers can support students in developing a metacognitive language-learning strategy that increases intrinsic motivation to learn. To do so, we carried out an intervention where we applied a motivation model in eight language groups in various upper secondary schools. This method focused on identifying goals, success factors, obstacles, as well as making an action plan to succeed with reaching individual goals. Our findings show that the students studying English were more concerned with mastering skills, in particular speaking, whereas the foreign language students were more concerned with performance-based objectives, such as learning grammar and getting good grades. Also, we saw that many of the English students found the approach useful and motivating, whereas most of the foreign language students were somewhat negative to it. As this study involved a limited number of groups, it could be regarded a pilot study. Despite this limitation, we conclude that the method applied in this study may provide a useful tool for developing self-regulated learners, but this needs to be tested in further studies.