The Role of genre and embedded genres in tertiary students' writing

The concept of genre has provided a valuable framework for researching aspects of academic writing such as discourse organisation. However, there has been little research on the role of genre and writing for tertiary students’ learning of disciplinary knowledge. This paper investigates the ways in which undergraduate education students’ written assignments contribute to the students’ learning of disciplinary knowledge. The texts for discussion are 44 undergraduate education students’ assignments collected as part of a three-year longitudinal study at a regional Australian university. The theoretical framework is genre theory as developed within systemic functional linguistics. The findings show that the students wrote primarily expositions and discussions; however, they also embedded a range of other genres in these macro-genre structures. The embedding of more descriptive genres such as exemplums allowed the students to review, exemplify, and build up knowledge within an expository structure. The findings from this discourse analytical study have implications for the ways in which English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and language support lecturers predict discourse structure from assignment questions and advise students on discourse organisation. The findings also provide insights into the ways in which successful writers embed genres to support not only their written arguments but to review and build up their developing disciplinary knowledge.

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