Exploring Changes in University Students’ Persuasive Writings with the SFL-based Genre Instruction

Abstract

This study aims to explore the changes students make in their persuasive writing practice with each of the three iterations of the SFL-based (Systemic Functional Linguistics) genre instruction. The random sampling of an intact class of 30 students who were divided into 6 groups from a Chinese university’s English department participated the study. A constructed SFL-based genre teaching model of a four-staged teaching/learning cycle was applied to conduct the teaching instruction. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the group writing compositions. After three iterations of teaching/learning cycle, the data analysis for students’ writing results showed that students improved in following the essential elements of the generic structure of persuasion, and applying some lexicogrammatical features to express the three metafunctions of language in a particular context, even though they still faced challenges in applying some lexical-grammatical features. The findings indicated that this genre-based approach enhanced students’ understanding of genres, and the typical features of explicit teaching, collaborative writing and scaffolding in the SFL-based genre pedagogy helped students write to right.