Awareness Versus Production: Probing Students’ Antecedent Genre Knowledge
- 11 June 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Business and Technical Communication
- Vol. 24 (4), 476-515
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651910371302
Abstract
This article explores the role of students’ prior, or antecedent, genre knowledge in relation to their developing disciplinary genre competence by drawing on an illustrative example of an engineering genre-competence assessment. The initial outcomes of this diagnostic assessment suggest that students’ ability to successfully identify and characterize rhetorical and textual features of a genre does not guarantee their successful writing performance in the genre. Although previous active participation in genre production (writing) seems to have a defining influence on students’ ability to write in the genre, such participation appears to be a necessary but insufficient precondition for genre-competence development. The authors discuss the usefulness of probing student antecedent genre knowledge early in communication courses as a potential source for macrolevel curriculum decisions and microlevel pedagogical adjustments in course design, and they propose directions for future research.Keywords
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