Developing academic writing

Genre-based approaches are widely used in the pedagogy of academic writing. The best-known international genre-based approaches to academic writing instruction are often summed up under the concept of genre acquisition and are referred to as explicit genre-based approaches, as they focus on the analysis and the teaching of specific genres. Critics of the genre acquisition approach, however, criticise it for being too reproductive and prescriptive. According to these critics, genre acquisition might result in formulaic knowledge that is limited to the mastery of single genres and not transferable across different genres, which in turn might be demotivating in the long run. In reaction to the criticism of genre acquisition approaches, some genre pedagogues have suggested to not teach genres too explicitly and isolated from each other, but to develop genre awareness in academic writing novices, thereby enabling learning how to write in new writing situations. From a methodological point of view, the genre awareness approach seeks to not teach genres in isolation, but in a way where learners compare genres already known to them with ones that they are not familiar with, thereby to a greater extent analysing the context in which certain genres are produced. There is, however, no solid empirical basis for these discussions around the advantages and disadvantages of various genre-based approaches to academic writing instruction, especially from a developmental perspective. The longitudinal efficacy of genre-based approaches with regards to possible transfer and motivation issues has so far mainly been discussed on the basis of empirical findings that do not allow for any causal deductions. To this end, a longitudinal intervention study will be carried out in this research project using a sample of N=240 pupils over a period of 3 years (9-12 grades) with a total of 6 measurement points. The intervention serves as preparation for the Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit (pre-scientific thesis written at the end of secondary education in Austria). Three different treatment groups (implicit genre acquisition, explicit genre teaching, genre awareness) are compared with each other. Overall, the study aims to show not only how academic text quality and academic writing motivation develop under the influence of different genre-based writing instructions over a period of three years, but also whether and to what extent the skills acquired during the intervention can be transferred by the students across different genres.