Since the early 1990s interest has surged in developing edutainment software, namely applications that possess the allure of electronic games while achieving educational goals. In the rush to adopt this new seemingly harmless technological fad, both educators and parents overlooked its long-term harmful effects. The aim of this article is to draw attention to these effects, particularly to the inflated expectation in the learners that the process of learning should always be colourful and fun, and that they can acquire information without work and serious study. It argues that what is essential is realizing that education is concerned with the development of cognitive structures and that educational technology is a medium, not a pedagogy that is useful in creating such learning environments. In this context, it may be time to examine critically the educational potential of edutainment software together with the advantages and disadvantages it might bring to the instructional process. The discussion begins, after a brief definition of edutainment, with an understanding of what technology and education entail. Then the discussion broadens to a critique of problems with edutainment drawing on the findings of educational psychology.

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The aim of the genre-based pedagogy is to focus on students' academic needs and enable them to read and write successfully (Martin, 1993, 2009). Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to understand the range of written genres and other writing skills that students need to use in their academic studies. This study has aimed to design an alternative and effective way of teaching writing to English Language and Literature students within the genre-based pedagogy considering their academic needs. The present study attempts to investigate the process of building metacognitive genre-awareness and show how it influences English Language and Literature students' ability to interpret and compose academic texts. The present study is designed as a case study, and mixed methods of data collection and analysis have been adopted. Several sources of data coming from both the teacher herself and the students such as classroom observation and teacher's journal, students' written texts (portfolios), students' diaries and interview with students have been used to have a deeper understanding of the process of genre-based writing instruction. The results of the study indicate that most of the students acquired, at least, metacognitive awareness of the declarative type, they seem to move their writing ability up and there is a general improvement in their writing performance.

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