The Effects of Genre Analysis Pedagogy

This paper presents the results of two studies that consider the effects of various pedagogical approaches in professional writing classes. The findings indicate that both a moves analysis approach and a chronotopic approach lead to cover letters that have significant lexico-grammatical differences from those written under a nongenre analysis approach. The findings also indicate that cover letters written under a genre analysis approach are evaluated differently than those written under a chronotopic or non-genre analysis approach. These findings have important implications for the use of genre analysis methods in the English for Specific Purposes classroom. INTRODUCTION Most researchers and classroom practitioners support the use of genre analysis in the classroom. This is evidenced by the multiple corpus-based studies that analyze the effectiveness of genre-based instructional approaches. However, to date, there have been few, if any, analyses that consider the situational effects of genre-based instruction. This paper hopes to address that gap by presenting two classroom-based studies that compare the effects of genre-based instruction to that of non-genre based instruction. Besides examining the situational effects of genre analysis teaching, this study is unique as it will consider two genre-based approaches: genre analysis (Swales, 1991) and chronotopic analysis (Crossley, 2007). In examining these