English 495: Tuesday, February 22

I will admit that, probably because I am extremely green about the topic in general, I find the genre-based pedagogy versus the process-view to be a confusing one. I begin this blog post with what I mentioned in one of the first classes: preservice teachers are still getting educated to use the process approach when teaching writing to secondary students, be it ESL or those "native speakers." When I was in those classes, I never heard the phrase genre-based approach. Yes, we all knew what genres were, but a named approach as such never entered into the fray there. I still find that rather interesting....

When I examine them, I see good and bad with both approaches, althoughy my understanding of the genre approach may still be extremely incomplete. As Hyland states in his article, I find that students should be aware that writing is dialogic, that we have that plurality of voices. "It would be much easier for all of us to teach students who are like us," but then we probably wouldn't have a need for this class, either (Hyland 148). Yet, I also view any type of writing as a recursive process, including my own. Regardless of the genre, I am I writing, editing, rewriting, etc.

I agree that the process-based approach is often "individual problem-solving," but it also involves a lot of hands-on approach from teachers. When I taught various writing assignments, I would be actively involved in the students' learning despite using the process approach. I don't think that I ever felt disempowered.

I'm also left with a lot of questions, per usual, which I hope we can clarify through class discussion. It's wonderful to say that a class is a community of writers and that each student's work speaks to one another, but how does one get a class of freshmen to think about this and understand this concept? Do they even need to as long as their writing is improving.? If a teacher is employing this genre-based approach in her classroom, which genres does she choose to teach? Which get left out? Are the ones chosen deemed more important? Ultimately, I would love to see a full unit plan of utilizing this genre-based approach in a high school classroom. Through what activities/discussions does a teacher get an ESL student to understand that "literacies are common resources which are realised in social relationship" (24)?

I'm left to wonder if we can't somehow combine the approaches, taking the best from both--because I do see that both have their high points. Why can't the process approach be more explicit in instruction and focused specifically on a genre? Does process writing really fail to make plain waht is being learned? Why can't the teacher be explicit about that, as well?