Single Paper Session 11

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Enhancing academic writing through Systemic Functional Genre Pedagogy in Higher Education

Keywords
academic writing;L2;pedagogy and instruction;writing instruction
Domain
Higher Education

Abstract

Academic writing remains a persistent challenge in Ghanaian higher education, particularly for first-year students transitioning from secondary to tertiary education. This paper examines how Systemic Functional Genre Pedagogy (SFGP) can enhance academic literacy by explicitly teaching the genres through which disciplinary knowledge is constructed and communicated. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study conceptualizes academic writing as a socially situated and meaning-making practice rather than a set of decontextualized skills. The study reports on a six-week classroom-based writing workshop implemented at an African university. Using a pre–post intervention design, student texts produced before and after the workshop were analyzed to trace changes in discourse-level control, with particular attention to Theme–Rheme organization, transitivity patterns, and cohesive resources. Classroom observations and lecturer reflections complemented the textual analysis, offering insight into pedagogical processes and shifts in instructional assumptions. Findings indicate noticeable improvements in students’ organization, thematic development, argumentation, and textual cohesion. Students reported increased awareness of academic conventions and greater confidence in structuring disciplinary texts. Lecturer reflections further reveal a shift from deficit-oriented explanations of student writing difficulties toward more scaffolded and explicit teaching approaches informed by genre awareness. By situating SFGP within multilingual higher education context, the study demonstrates how genre-based pedagogy can function as a developmental rather than remedial approach to academic writing instruction. The findings have implications for communication skills curricula, lecturer professional development, and ongoing debates on academic literacies in Global South higher education. Overall, the paper illustrates how writing research can be translated into reflective and scaffolded writing practice in higher education, aligning empirical inquiry with pedagogical innovation.

Multi-genre pedagogy: fostering transfer, metacognition, and rhetorical agility in doctoral writing

Keywords
academic writing;metacognition;writing instruction;writing skills
Domain
Higher Education

Abstract

As scientists and academics increasingly communicate beyond academic contexts, adapting writing to diverse audiences and genres has become crucial (Negretti et al., 2023). This project addresses how writing pedagogy can promote such adaptability by designing and evaluating a multi-genre pedagogy approach for doctoral writing instruction. Theoretically, the study builds on Swales’ (1990) question of whether and how skills acquired from one genre transfer to another. Tardy et al.’s (2020) framework conceptualizes genre knowledge and metacognition as key to effective recontextualization: genre-specific knowledge relates to genre awareness, interacting with metacognitive processes when writers face unfamiliar communicative demands—a relationship that remains underexplored in research. Methodologically, we adopt Swales and Feak (2023) to design in-class task sequences combining academic and popularization genres. Qualitative data were collected in Scandinavia and the UK through students’ written texts and interviews and analysed to explore students’ strategies for transfer and recontextualization. Preliminary findings show that students recontextualize knowledge for different audiences by engaging in reformulation—shifting register through lexical and grammatical choices—but also in more complex adaptations such as rhetorical adjustments, storytelling, and unpacking. Interviews indicate that these shifts are metacognitive and deliberate, linking genre-specific knowledge, broader genre awareness, and metacogntive awareness of themselves as researchers and writers. We provide evidence of the interaction between genre-specific knowledge and genre awareness in students’ metacognitive decisions about rhetorical and linguistic features across genres. Our study pushes the boundaries of genre-based instruction beyond reproducing traditional academic genres, to include tasks that emphasize rhetorical adaptability and transfer.Negretti, R., Sjöberg-Hawke, C., Persson, M., & Cervin-Ellqvist, M. (2023). Thinking outside the box: senior scientists’ metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) and self-regulation of writing for science communication. Journal of Writing Research, 15(2), 333–361.Tardy, C. M., Sommer-Farias, B., & Gevers, J. (2020). Teaching and researching genre knowledge: toward an enhanced theoretical framework. Written Communication, 37(3), 287–321.Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. CUP.Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2023). Task evolution in English for Academic Purposes writing materials: The case of “Information Transfer” to “Critical Commentary”. Journal of Second Language Writing, 61(101017).

Teaching Reasoning in Argumentative Writing through Explicit Heuristics

Keywords
academic writing;pedagogy and instruction;writing instruction;writing skills
Domain
Higher Education

Abstract

This presentation explores how a linguistically informed reasoning heuristic can enhance the teaching and learning of argumentative writing in multilingual higher education. We focus on a first-year writing (FYW) course at an American university in the Middle East, where most students write in English as an additional language. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) genre-based pedagogy (e.g., Dreyfus et al., 2016; Authors, 2024), we investigate how the heuristic I know, I see, I conclude (adapted from Hao, 2020) helps students connect conceptual knowledge, textual evidence, and evaluative reasoning.The research centers on a Case Analysis assignment in which students analyze a real-world case related to taste and distinction through the lens of Bourdieu’s (1984) theory. To scaffold the assignment, we used the I know, I see, I conclude heuristic to make explicit how writers move between reasoning positions: drawing on disciplinary frameworks (I know), applying them to case details (I see), and developing interpretive claims (I conclude). To document student uptake of the heuristic, we coded paragraphs for reasoning positions and logical relations to examine how novice writers connect ideas.Findings indicate that explicit reasoning instruction helps students balance theoretical abstraction and contextual specificity, leading to more effective analytical writing. However, many struggle to sustain logical coherence when shifting between reasoning positions. We discuss how these findings inform refinements to instructional materials that explicitly teach common effective patterns that successful students use to structure their paragraphs and logically connect their ideas as they move between the reasoning positions. By linking linguistic analysis to pedagogical design, we show how SFL-based frameworks can enhance writing instruction in multilingual higher education.Keywords: academic writing; argumentative writing; reasoning; systemic functional linguisticsReferencesAuthors. (2024).Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.Dreyfus, S. J., Humphrey, S., Mahboob, A., & Martin, J. R. (2016). Genre pedagogy in higher education: The SLATE project. Palgrave Macmillan.Hao, J. (2020). Analysing scientific discourse from a systemic functional linguistic perspective: A framework for exploring knowledge building in biology. Routledge.