ABSTRACT
During the 1970s and 1980s an approach to teaching literacy, usually referred to as process writing, became influential in North America. Since the mid-1980s, however, an alternative writing pedagogy has been gathering strength in Australia, and, at least in that country, that set to replace process writing as the main teaching orthodoxy. In process writing pupils are seen as apprentice authors writing for real audiences. Their writing is published and put into the class library for other pupils to read. Proponents of the genre approach argue that writing is very different from talk, and pupils cannot simply pick up the specialist linguistic structures involved: they need to be taught. The genre approach focuses strongly on how to construct particular kinds of texts. The process writing and genre approaches derive from different theoretical models: the first treats language as a personal resource, and the second, language as a social construct.
