ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty-five years, genre has become a major focus in the teaching of academic writing. The attention to genre is seen in textbooks for mixed-discipline writing courses (e.g. Devitt, Reiff and Bawarshi, 2004; Swales and Feak, 2012), as well as in more specialised writing materials for nursing (e.g. Gimenez, 2011), law and business (e.g. Bhatia, 1993) and other fields. Genre-based teaching approaches are also referred to in many of the chapters in this volume. The present chapter illustrates what such an approach may look like in a discipline-specific writing course. Specifically, it offers an activity sequence for familiarising students with critique genres, a family of genres found in many fields (Dobson and Feak, 2001; Nesi and Gardner, 2012; Swales and Feak, 2012). The activities also aim to help students develop a general genre awareness that they can draw upon when faced with writing unfamiliar genres in their disciplinary courses and workplaces. To situate these activities within current perspectives on genre teaching, the chapter begins by offering an overview of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approaches to genre-based instruction and research on the efficacy of these approaches for promoting genre learning. It then describes the activities and considers their long-term benefits for students in light of recent scholarship on genre knowledge transfer.
